sweet thing

photo from garance dore

i think this chick is a knockout. seriously, she is flawless. she is like a jane birkin replica...like some perfect polaroid from the 70's... one part cowboy, one part sex kitten, one part california dream...and a whole lotta sweet thing. 

[she is australian and awesome! and her name is jade sarita arnott 

and she has her own label, arnsdorf]

the accidental room

apartment therapy

room envy

new york social diary

ahomeinberlin

housetohome

i'm pretty obsessed with dining rooms right now. they seem to be the room you can do anything with. there is space to be exuberant and gutsy and frivolous. there is room for texture and contrast and humor. i love a dining room that is more haphazard than formal, more accidental than deliberate. I love a dining room that functions as many rooms... a saloon, a gallery, a parlor, or my favorite— a library... yes, i would love a dining room/library... i think that would be perfect...all those books against the walls and big tufted armchairs against the windows to sit and read for hours in...

the hyena & other men

this is a photo of a hyena handler that is from a series of photos, the hyena & other men (series II, 2005-2007),  pieter hugo took in nigeria. i think the photos are disturbing and beautiful and bewildering. there is something so mythological, so fantastical and gruesome about these images and the reality of these men and animals.

a quote from pieter hugo:

these photographs came about after a friend emailed me an image taken on a cellphone through a car window in lagos, nigeria, which depicted a group of men walking down the street with a hyena in chains...the image captivated me. 

make sure you read the essay, 'the dog's master' (just make sure to scroll down the page, past the photos to get to the essay) by pieter hugo. it is compelling and provoking and skillfully articulates his understanding of these hyena handlers and their experience.

summer color

frye ada pleats peep pump

true religion kara sandal

luichiny clementine bootie

fergie gina flat

madden girl reeze sandal

i love the idea of wearing light neutrals all summer long—ivory white and soft cream and heather gray and muted olive—and then putting on a super bright pair of kicks. and when i look down at me feet i will think of a single balloon floating upwards against blue sky and white clouds, or maybe a lollipop against a child's tongue, or a cool glass of lemonade garnished with a sprig of mint. it will be great.

chateau des alpilles hotel

this place looks amazing. and quiet and clean, and extravagant without being glitzy. it would be amazing to live here for a few weeks— and walk beneath those trees, and swim in that pool, and sleep in that sparse perfect room, and eat with a stranger who might become a friend at one of those small dining tables...or just to stay here for a night or two while traveling from place to place in France— a day or two of ease and luxury and slow-moving hours. 

check it out for yourself here

hotel chelsea

hotel chelsea

i used to live in this hotel with my father and my big mastiff puppy. we lived in room 505. we lived there from early spring to the very end of the summer, maybe we even moved out in september. a hotel full of oddballs and originals, hustlers and auteurs, misfits and luminaries. a hotel of long marble corridors and slow-motion elevators. my father and i became best friends in that hotel room, in that room number 505. we liked to read in the afternoons, each one of us on our own bed, not talking, just staying quiet and reading, and the big baby dog sleeping in a patch of sun on the floor...and then my father would fall asleep too and i would listen to both him and the puppy snoring away like cartoon characters. that summer we did everything together. we played backgammon, sitting cross-legged on one of the beds, drinking iced coffees, shit-talking and rubbing the dice for luck. we hailed cabs, took walks, and rode bicycles. we went to the movies and ate candy and popcorn and mostly always left halfway through because he could never sit still in movie theaters— they bored him, made him antsy. and we would sit out on the balcony and he would smoke his dunhills and i would listen to him tell stories about all the things he had seen and done, before i was born, before he was my father. in the middle of that summer a girl committed suicide. she jumped from the 9th or 10th floor, i can't remember which. i was sitting by the window and even amid all the noise and bustle of w. 23rd, i heard her hit the pavement. i didn't know what had happened though. i just heard a sound. and then the sirens came and by the time i looked out our window, her body had a blanket over it. but her shoes had been neatly placed by her side and blood was still moving on the pavement. my father wasn't with me in the room when it happened, he was walking home. but he saw what i saw, from the corner he had just rounded, a half a block away. even though he wasn't with me, looking down from the window, he still saw that same moment. together we watched the same thing happen, him from the corner, me from the window.

twiggy!

twiggy: i like her freckles and biggish ears. i like that she looked at once like a  zombie, a schoolboy, a raccoon,  and a music-box ballerina. I like how tiny and fragile and demure she was, but that there always seemed to be a flinty dare in her eyes. and i like those eyes—so excessive and dramatic. the thick liner and eye-shadow and the fake eyelashes, and all that mascara...it's too much and i like it. it's as if her eyes never shut, never slept, never blinked, they just stayed wide open in a wispy kind of wonder. it's a good look. 

(if you wanna try it i think mascara is the key ingredient, and here are some i like: maybelline lash stiletto, bare escentuals buxom lash, clinique high definition lashes )

if you ain't cowboy you ain't shit

richard prince's untitled (cowboy) (1989)

i'm obsessed with the imagined cowboy. the romantic cowboy. the hyper-real cowboy. the one that never existed, never could have existed. the one that can only exist in the heartland of myth and whimsy. a perfect work of fiction.