The house smells like a mixture of latkes and eucalyptus. An empty bottle of Anders Frederik Steen
I like it when your fingertips slide through my hair sits in the counter. It was nice, which I was glad of after his extremely disappointing Brighter Cider of Life earlier this year. This one is a brightly resinous Viognier. Deep but also refreshing, like preserved lemons.
We drank it last night, with Lucy. I threw together a surprisingly satisfying dinner with stuff we had lying around (potatoes became latkes, frozen mince became meatballs, beets and carrots became respective salads flecked with scallions or vinegary shallots). A couple of big spoonfuls of greek yogurt bc sour cream is hard to come by here. Not bad! Lucy managed to convince me I should not get bangs just because I’m bored. She suggested that some things, like my perpetual slightly disheveled curly bun with escaping tendrils, can in fact, last a lifetime. We’ll see.
I spent the day doing Dinner Again Prep. It’s on Tuesday and there is 1! seat left. Though technically bc Dani has requested to eat instead of work, there are in fact 20 people already dining.
I have to tell you what an incredible convenience the sausage stuffing machine is. Lettice’s mother Lottie loaned me hers and it has utterly transformed my life. The amount of hours, over the years, that I have spent toiling over a pile of ground meat and a bowl of intensities with nothing but my wits and a chopstick, would shock you, dear reader. Today, once the meat was chopped and seasoned, I swear it took maybe 6 minutes to produce a garland of perfect links. I am floored and in awe, and despite my general distrust of machines, converted.
I am excited for Tuesday, and know I will get more excited when I get to set the tables and set the thing in motion. Still that thing that always happens is happening, which is, after toiling over this menu for so long I have began to dream of another.
In my imagination this other menu takes place when it is deathly cold out. We drink bullshots (a Bloody Mary but with beef consommé instead of tomato juice) and nibble on dark mysterious riches like black pickled walnuts whipped into a dressing, poached prunes, and pine schnapps!
This is the only way I keep myself willing to be alive in Winter! Everyone keeps reposting that infographic about how seasonal affective disorder isn’t the problem, capitalism is. And I’m like, sure, I agree with you but I still have to go to go work when it’s cold and dark! This is the world currently and I live in it! Thus, my advice to you is to start envisioning a Winter aesthetic, both clothing wise, and beyond. Romanticism is the only way. I want objects which are symbolically kindred to my brown mink coat, you know? Foods which are the equivalent of black velvet.
Red eye shadow is my newest discovery, I plan to don it all winter while wearing brown & black together. I recently came to the shocking conclusion that I’ve been wearing blue for years bc it’s my favorite color but it doesn’t actually suit me. I have a tendency to wear clothes that I love as beautiful objects rather than clothes that particularly highlight my physical existence. That is ok sometimes but sometimes I want to remember that I exist.
My other grand epiphany is: cottage cheese. Holy moly! What a chic little delight. My sweet mother, traumatized as she was by the 80’s, never kept cottage cheese in the house and I grew up with the impression that it was foolish bland diet food to be sniffed at. But folks, last night Lucy brought some over, some good rich full fat cottage cheese in an un-overwhelming 200g jar and my whole world has changed. We had it as dessert, with really really ripe Japanese persimmons & some squares of milk chocolate. I’m never looking back.
It’s just like ricotta but without any grainyness and I am sad for it’s bad rap. All these years missed out!
Dani and I watched Don’t Worry Darling and it was ok. The best thing was Florence’s little black velvet bow. I promptly purchased myself a little hair ribbon (consolation for my lack of hairstyle change). Mostly it just made me miss California and wonder as I always wonder what it is in me that longs for things so different than the sun bleached palm lined balminess of my childhood?
It is, unsurprisingly, absolutely pouring with rain here. The mud, the wet clothes hung to dry in front of the wood burner, the wet seat of my bicycle.
Due to our car breaking down and our electricity costs at work skyrocketing we aren’t going to make it to the west coast as planned this winter. I’m sad but also kind of numb. I just so happened to read Sam Johnson-Schlee’s Living Rooms while listening to a Bunny Mellon biography on audio book. Then that famous Joan Dideon quote popped up on Instagram so I decided to give Slouching Towards Bethlehem another shot. Ugh, the theme of home is RESOUNDING.
There’s so much to say and I could probably fill another whole newsletter or three. But basically, it’s funny to read a very smart critique of capitalism via a history of very specific interior design facets meets memoir while also reading about a woman who was obsessed with the details of all things material and so wealthy there were no limits to her grandiose productions. I think Sam would find her interesting. I think he, like me, would like the anecdote about Bunny’s rival throwing a party where perfume was rubbed on all the lightbulbs so they would heat and let off their soft aroma all night long. Gorgeous.
In any case, I find myself mulling over my classically capitalistic urge to build a castle around myself. Moving both figuratively and literally, further and further away from everything I’ve ever known while simultaneously, obsessing over the “concept” of home. Like most things in this life, I enjoy said concept in curated bursts of my own devise. Plus, I am not an inherently lonesome person. But, I best stop self-declaring, or else, you (and I) wont believe me.
I don’t really love Joan. Again, I could probably sit down and actually try to figure out why and write it out and make a whole essay. In the meantime, I will admit that, along with 6 million other people on Instagram, this line in “On Going Home” knocks my wind right out: Sometimes I think those of us who are now in our thirties were born into the last generation to carry the burden of “home”, to find in family life the source of all tension and drama. I had by all accounts a “normal” and a “happy” family situation, and yet I was almost thirty years old before I could talk to my family on the telephone without crying after I had hung up. We did not fight. Nothing was wrong. And yet some nameless anxiety colored the emotional charges between me and the place that I came from”.
Sigh. As per usual she kind of annoys me, and yet…
Then she says of her daughter: She is an open and trusting child, unprepared and unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great grandmother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that. I give her a xylophone, and a sundress from Madiera, and promise to tell her a funny story”.
This I too, think about. When I picture having a child I don’t envision family or even community so much as I envision us, me and this daughter (of course) driving somewhere, and it’s somewhere fun. The realities of parenthood, probably, if we are lucky, comprise some of each, plus many other things. I don’t know. On the other hand I cannot fathom a world where my child doesn’t know all my grandparents.
For the sake of clarification, said “child” remains at least for now, entirely theoretical. And thank god, because I got anxious recently when a group of more than five of us went to the movies and there was a slight familial-esque tussle about which row to sit in. I personally could not have cared less where we sat, but the utterly banal and deeply communal tension of the whole thing gave me the willies. Similarly, though sonically designed in its entirety to give you an anxiety attack, that final incredibly noisy scene in Shiva Baby where everyone piles into the mini van nearly killed me. I seldom feel very “the more the merrier” and am not sure I am cut out for the “ambushes” of family life either.
Anyway, I am at least, cut out for dinner parties. Wish me luck for Tuesday. Soon, hopefully, we can all swig back a bullshot in the snow. Winter won’t be so unbearable, as long as the sun occasionally gleams off of brown fur. Sending love xxx