Weekend Reading List

I spent an hour Saturday afternoon in Page One with T looking at the glossy, well-organised YSL (2010) page by page. I count this as a rare pleasure: this sort of sharing of a passion with someone discerning and knowledgeable and interested. Much more nourishing than sitting down to an indifferent meal, or getting drunk. It's a lovely retrospective book (yet another one, perhaps the last one, the best one yet?) that is the catelogue, published under the aegis of the French First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, for the Petit Palais museum exhibition of Yves Saint Laurent’s works (an archive of over 300 garments) last spring. That's Ms Bruni, the former muse, modelling the 1988 'Braque' wedding dress called Doves. I will go back and buy it to read the interviews, essays, although I dare say I would not discover so many new things.And then T showed me the book of Guy Bourdin polaroids, which we agreed no one else but he would buy; And then we chatted animatedly about Matthew Goode, and Giselle and Isabelli in the new (too dreary) Muse Mag, and about Adrien Brody on the cover of this men's magazine looking like he was recovering from a serious bout of food poisoning (why would anyone run a cover like that?), for the length of the queue to the cashier (it was so nice to see Singaporeans buying books - we are such a nation of readers!) to buy the August Vogue Paris. And in the usual order of things, T had to eat a Mosburger and drink and a large ice tea, and then we went to that CD shop and T bought a DVD of Leap Year because Matthew Goode is in it.And then just as soon as the cab door shut, I tore into the Vogue Paris and before I was home, just as I rounded the Newton Circle corner, I regretted buying it. It's bad, patchy, uninspired. Is it the season? Magazines are in a bad way now, aren't they? I then I sat me down with a (blue and white Ming) bowl of cherries and leafed through the Visionaire #32 Where (2000 - already a decade old), sort of travel-themed, a stack of postcards that comes in an Hermes folder. It's a mystery why Hermes would want to be associated with this project which rather lowers. LB gave this to me one afternoon recently, for no apparent reason, in his darkened room in Orchard Towers and with Little Chris showing me his travel snaps of his grand tour of Italy: Ponte Vecchio, the Coliseum, the Trevii fountain, Michelangelo's David. Little Chris, 21, reminded me of the Victorian debutantes in E M Forster, Edith Wharton and Henry James who had seen just such views on their grand tours. He's of that age, and has that innocence.
I think the postcards were only slightly more interesting, just ever so slightly more, than the unpeopled snaps.
And then I retired early to bed, the night howling with wild winds bringing sheets of clean, cold rain that shook the windows. I drank a cup (pink and gold Wedgewood) of hot almond milk, and swaddled in my various pillows (duck down, memory foam, microfill, cotton, kapok) read an Agatha Christie I've never read before (so truly rare!) Problem at Pollensa Bay.
And then sleep claimed me.