I like the spareness of the invite - I've seen wedding invites of air stewards more fancy than this. I wonder if The Queen also commanded Prince William to marry Miss Middleton. It's so nice to be The Queen; Your commands appear on notices like these - imagine sending out a flurry of these commands on a regular basis: So good for the soul.
This would be a Jane Austen's wardrobe crisis: What will she wear this spring? A spencer, a short military style jacket (top), or pelisse, which was longer (bottom)? What would you wear?
I wish Alan Hollinghurst would hurry up and bring out his new book The Stranger's Child. I can't wait for this to come out later this year (September). He's one of those gay writers who are real writers (please contrast and compare with mawkishly gay works of Paul Monette and I don't like Michael Cunningham either), if you know what I mean. I love Hollinghurst's books. Right now, I'm reading The Spell (1988) all over again, and loving it afresh. This paperback has followed me on quite a few trips around the world, and the pages are now tea coloured, but the language is still crisp and fresh and considered. I especially like the (anachronistic) fascination with house music and drugs, which reminds me of my own clumsy experiments so long ago. I still had my big monster Mac desktop computer then (it took up most of the rosewood 1950s desk), and I had just discovered online chatting.To counter all the (rubbish) reading I'm doing about the dreadful new round of fall shows, I've turned to The Illiad (Translated by Robert Fagles). This version comes highly recommended by Uncle C as being the definitive translation; He should know, he's an academic. If you're disenchanted by all else, pick this up. Do not go and get a tattoo or pierce your ear, or whatever people do when they get bored. I saw a fat lesbian who peirced the tip of her ear in the lift today; she wore a black stud, and ill-fitting cargo berms, and I felt like leaving the lift. I don't know what it is about lesbians who like to make themselves just as disagreeably ugly as they can. I don't see the point, do you? (The painting is my Illiad crush, Patroclus, painted by Jacques Louis David in 1780; Don't even ask me why I picked Patroclus.) I'm never ever bored. Last Friday, after a client meeting (I grinned and nodded for 40 minutes; My jaw ached, and I'd gone partially blind from blanking out behind my interested stare), I went to Chanel and smelled a lot of perfumes from those marvellous white ceramic blotters, and talked to Ms Loy about perfumes for an hour or so. Chanel doesn't use paper blotters - they are so classy that they use these white ceramic tubes that are fitted into a tabletop and you just pick each stick up and sniff at it. Very civilized. We sniffed and talked, sniffed and talked. I went away with a new fascination for Coco eau de parfum (1984), as they haven't added to thier Les Exclusif line after Beige. I went home and climbed on a teak stool in the bathroom, and shifted three shelves of perfumes around untill I found my bottle of Coco. I also found the matching body cream, and a bar of Sisley bath soap. I put some perfume on while still atop the stool, got down, teased out the Luca Turin perfume guide, and read all about Coco. That night, I went to bed smelling of Coco, and read all the magazines (Vogue, Man About Town, etc) which I dragged home from the office, and fell asleep at 11.You see, I didn't rush out to get an extreme hair cut or tattoo, or pierce my ears so that I can look disagreeable, or wear hideous cargo berms with hideous new trainers. I have a closet full of perfume. I have friends who are interesting to talk to. I have a bed with lovely grey Egyptian cotton sheets and candles from Laduree. I read.
"You gotta have Style. It helps you get down the stairs. It helps you get up in the morning.It's a way of Life. Without it you're nobody. I'm not talking about a lot of clothes." -Diana Vreeland"I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people." - Mark Twain
"I think it is important that people not get too caught up in having a certain style. It is so limiting. People should do what pleases them and it will all work out." - Isabelle D'Ornano
"In came Marlene, with a great, big record - great, BIG record! -- and she said, 'Oh, dahwings, would you like to hear my wehcord?' And she put the record on, and it was just applause! And Marlene would lift needle and say, 'Und dot's Fwankfuht.' 'Dot's Berlin.' But not one note of music...just applause! And Noel [Coward] turned to me and said, 'I hope there's not another side!'" - Judy Garland
"I’m sure there is a lot who want to push me out of the way, because this is fashion. It’s never very faithful, you know, and people want change all the time. This is the purpose of fashion, so I don’t know what is going to happen with me." - Carine Roitfeld
The paintings are from Fragrance Fills the Courtyard: Chinese Flower Paintings through the Ages, an ongoing exhibition at Taipei's lovely National Palace Museum. That one chrysanthemum is sublime! So refined and elegant beyound anything on earth.
I've been eating a lot of fine Chinese food over the Chinese New Year, and lots of yummy stuff cooked at home by mother, so pardon me as I leave a trail of drool as I stick my snout into the wonderful hawker food guide The End of Char Kway Teow and other Hawker Mysteries. It's by award-winning food blogger Dr Leslie Tay (ieatishootipost.sg) and it's gastroporn of the most delicious kind. Divided into chapters featuring all the heart-stopping Singapore street food like laksa, satay, rojak and other obsessions which I've not eaten in ages, it's a pretty definitive, opiniated, well-researched, guide including ratings and addresses and directions. I just want to tear downstairs and fly to the nearest hawker stand. Fortunately, the nearest one for me is Singapore's top biryani store (across the road); I don't like biryani, otherwise I'll be eating, not blogging.On a different note, I've been reading E M Forster's Collected Short Stories. They are queerly comforting, and read very much like period pieces. I didn't use to think so when I first discovered these in my 20s, but upon reading them again, I find that they feel anachronistic. It's truly a vanished world. Just downstairs, gay couples, with their Stussy T-shirts and sling bags, stroll in pairs of a Sunday morning, with nary a care in the world. They know no repression. They don't need polite metaphors for the love that once caused Forster panic and anxiety. They have their lattes, and designer flip flops and Lady Gaga. Needless to say, I prefer polite metaphors and Merchant-Ivory movies.I just read in the papers that drinking more than two cups of coffee a day can be good for your health - specifically, some substance in coffee supposedly lowers the risk of diabetes. Alas I can only drink one cup a day, and never after 1pm for fear I would be tossing and turning the better part of the night away. However, I've been completely absorbed by the 2008 Korean drama Coffee Prince. I'm not ashamed to admit this because this is simply one of the best things I've seen in a long while and it's a very well made entertainment, perfectly cast (gorgeous good actors) and cleverly written to milk every adult tear still left in the desert of your folorn heart. It's completely escapist of course, with little that is realistic, but that's its magic I suppose. The girl is so poor that she has to disguise herself as a boy to work in a coffee house; No it doesn't make sense, and even her poverty never feels desperate or ugly, and is instead an excuse for very cute antics, and silly behaviour. There's no real crisis, no fatal illness, nothing upsetting or stressful, just the bittersweet romance of The Butterfly Lovers, or Yentl, or As You Like It, where the boy falls in love with the boy who is a girl, but with a Starbucks setting. Gong Yoo, the leading man, is of course meltingly adorable (as yummy as the best oyster omelette), and has become an obsession. I can't believe how ideal they've made him, and how unrealistic and impossible to match in real life. So that's my discovery in the Year of the Hare, and if you find yourself all alone this Valentine's Day, do not despair. Go to your nearest DVD store and buy Coffee Prince - Gong Yoo is simply the best thing since... E M Forster?
PC Air, a newly launched Thai airline has adopted a policy of recruiting transsexuals as flight attendants in an effort to offer equal opportunities to the 'third sex'. This is a world first, and I like the pioneering spirit. The transgender attendants will wear a special gold-coloured 'third-sex' name tag to help passengers and immigration authorities know what gender they are dealing with, she said.Thanyarat Jiraphatpakorn, winner of the 2007 Miss Tiffany transsexual beauty pageant, was among the six successful candidates to land a job on the new airline, which launched flights on March 1.
I approve completely. And just to remind you how great the 1990s really were: Linda, and all the supermodels of thte day were truly the first transexual trolley dollies that ever took to the runways! They will never win a Miss Tiffany would they? I don't think they would even get inot the finals!
Anyone would become a Dior Addict because this lipstick obviously comes LOADED with miracle photoshop serum - one quick swoosh and you too will look like a airbrush postcard from 1983. Only the eyeliner looks real. Oh Kate! Whatever will they do with you next?See what she looks like when she removes the lipstick?