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12/12/24 daffodils and fringe

7:59PM

I love love love love love having evenings alone at home. We were supposed to go to an industry holiday party tonight, but I've been feeling ill so I tell him to go, while I stay home. But I'm happy. Industry parties are so tiring anyways, always the same chats and the same faces and the same drinks in those laser cut plastic glasses, and a mind-fog by 8PM.

Having lived with J for six years, nights alone in my apartment are rare, and though I love being next to him all the time, cooking and watching movies and linking our hands together and wine-drunkk talking to him about a million disparate things while he nods and smiles, the nights when I'm alone here remind me of the fragile freedom of my early twenties, when I lived alone and clung to what few moments of frenzied joy I could grasp at. Back then, I hated being alone at home, so I was always out, late into the night until it became morning, scattered across the dancefloors of discos and warehouses and cold beaches and parking lots in the Palisades. I cried so much back then, all the time, sometimes at nothing at all. I was so so so sad. (I still am.)

Perhaps being alone now in my apartment, in my early thirties, with a gin and tonic and stupid little tasks to fixate on and a box of silence to laugh loudly in, is to make up for all those years I hated being indoors. Tonight I didn't have dinner because I didn't want one, but I smoke a filet of salmon I had been curing with hickory chips I have to keep relighting, a test for the NYE party-of-sorts that we are going to host soon. I cut a little piece and felt it was too salty, and just put it away to see if I would feel better about it tomorrow.

Then I got a little bored while watching the Kings game, so I decide to do some eyeshadow inventory. I only have two palettes now, the Isamaya Industrial palette, and one of the older Byredos, with the neon green and jewel purple and blue and pink. I never use the orange in the Isamaya palette, so I dig it out of the palette, and press as much of Victoria Beckham Midnight as I could into the pan, thinking I would use it more this way than if it was in the pot. The way the deep blue crushed and fell apart was beautiful to look at.

I receive the last packages of the year quite late, and relish opening them in my privacy ... a Little Flower EDP from Regime des Fleurs with Chloe Sevigny, and a Bode skirt. The fragrance had been one I'd been meaning for buy for years, but this year I finally did. I put it on my shelf with the others and beamed because it finally felt complete. Five perfect little bottles. Several dozen samples I keep neglecting to try pushed to the back. The Bode skirt ... black and silk with embroidered daffodils and fringe ... I have never owned anything like this. But I put it on and I felt something well up inside, a feeling too indescribable for now. Silk and fringe ... on me ... I love women's Bode so much ... likes Dries van Noten and Ann Demeulemeester and Yohji and Kiko ....

Now I am having a gin and tonic, and I'm walking around the apartment in shorts in the winter, and all my holiday lights are twinkling, and I feel so free. But still I take a steak out of the freezer and think about eating it tomorrow with J, with some kale braised with lemon, because I love him more than anything, and eating lemony dinners with him feels more free than anything.

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12/1/24 purgatory is a midday flight from JFK to LAX ... or the drive down I-5S into LA

5:09PM We're going back to LA, passing through the farms that split the 101 and the 5, and as J drives, I drift in and out of sleep. I catch glimpses of the sky and try to fight the drowsiness; since winter came I've seen so little of the sun that I thought I should try to look at the sky while it's light whenever I can, but my body feels weak. I sense things, but just barely -

golden listening to Cocteau Twins winter in California is never barren, it's greener than summer a rolling fog over the reservoir made reflective by the setting sun, or is it smoke? humming motors and squeaking wheels

At my mother's house, Thanksgiving is usually a guaranteed fistfight. J's first time meeting her was a thanksgiving weekend five or six years ago, and her eyes were so cold we left early. Another year, glasses thrown, shouting until she was hoarse. All of them left in tears. This year was somewhat quieter, like the strain of the years had finally started to hold her back. The house was quieter, but it was still so cold.

My sisters stay stuck in time. One has started talking to herself, and every so often her sweet facade cracks a little to spill a little anxiety, a little delusion out, and I am reminded of that my mother doesn't believe in mental illness, only mental weakness. Another brought home a new boyfriend, and like clockwork, he was accused the next morning. The youngest is fine, but I've never been able to read her.

--

The drive home is several hours longer than it normally would be - there was a pothole in the road somewhere along the Grapevine, and so J and I sat in a purgatorial silence as the radio splitted in and out. I tried checking the Kings score. It was dark. It was December 1. Time had passed so quickly, again, for the thousandth time, for the ten thousandth time, and I felt an anxious annoyance rising inside for failing to grasp it before November had already gone. Suddenly I felt frenetic with desire for specific things - a shop Christmas tree to read by in the corner of a bookstore, the kind we see less and less of every year in LA, a hot chocolate, women's Bode dripping with sequins and beads, holiday party trout dip and roe, holding hands with my friends. The end of Thanksgiving weekend has a way of illuminating how unprepared I am every year for the season, despite how desperately I always want to capture a feeling I haven't felt since I was seventeen...

Suddenly the standstill shakes and we are thirty minutes from home. Jamie XX's new album filters through the stale air inside the car, and I feel a little better for it.

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11/25/24 hollywood nights

5:09PM

Over a month now since the last entry. In that time the days have gotten colder, a grey chill I love more than anything else ... and despite that I haven't left my apartment all that much. On Saturday last, J and I did step out for the evening to try Mirate, a newer restaurant in Los Feliz that served Yucatan food, and it had been the first time I wore a coat all season. One day it was the final edge of summer, and the next we're knee-deep in LA winter, with the misty cloud settling in on the streets and everything. Very austere scene in Los Feliz that night, the cloud that was not a fog smudging out all the edges and gutters and letters, while neon signs and the spotlights of the Hollywood Bowl gleamed like ghosts. I wonder who played that night. I wonder why I never checked. Maybe because as the spotlights brushed the sky through all that misty cloud, and we drove up the 101 towards Ventura, all I could do was lazily string together a thousand "Lana must be near" type anachronisms.

Nothing really happened today either. I still didn't leave my apartment much, except to walk for a moment outside, in a t-shirt and thin polyester pants, of course purposefully done to feel the cold. Another coincidental mail day. SSENSE package with a Yohji turtleneck sweater with a wide, wide gauge, and a Seb Brown ring that was supposed to be white gold with little sapphires and tsavorites and a tiny tiny diamond, but ended up being silver. I didn't mind, I had wanted the silver, which for some reason was more expensive than the white gold. I peered at the diamond - so small that it felt silly that I'd had to send in a certificate to customs declaring it wasn't from Russia. (Because we're always at odds with Russia, aren't we?) And then another package from Germany with a new hinoki candle, a Fara Homidi lip compact, a new pot of skincare I wanted to try. Beautiful things, all of them. But just things.

I wish I could say what I really mean. But even in this vacuum of a digital sinkhole, I can't bring myself to.

[paper-window]

10/22/24 cool toned

7:22PM

Small, unproductive observations about beauty -

Deep red, brown, purple, but not warm, barely neutral. Leaning cool, like the edge of dusk in the winter. I found myself letting go of all the warmer-toned lipsticks I had held onto for this long. Returning to myself, to the Dries van Noten aubergines and Westman Atelier's Lou Lou, and the reddish blushes that look like a smear of bruised, burst capillaries.

I will alway line the bottom lashline, with a harsh liquid black or a waxy, cold brown, maybe purple, or red, but never bare.

The difference in luxury feel is a graininess, a tugging at the lines of the lips. Waxy formulas feel too young, too occlusive, too mask-like. The powdery finish of Dries and Westman Atelier lipsticks, the thinness in the deep, sheer purples. I think I value texture and feeling more than color now. Everyone makes beautiful colors.

Dark hair, dark eyes, dark nails.

Somehow I have returned to what I liked when I was seventeen ...

Reading - The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevky

Listening - Racing Toward A Red Light, Saosin Pinky Ring, Joy Orbison Universal Nation, Push Marquee Moon, Television Rx Queen, Deftones

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10/14/24 cursed objects

6:19AM

The first thought i have this morning - cold. I’m trying to get back in the habit of rising early again, so i brush away the last flickers of an already-forgotten dream, and read a list of book recommendations, even though I should probably just choose another of the stack of unopened ones I already have waiting, some for years. It’s October, perhaps I’ll start The Brothers Karamazov. A fin de siècle courtroom mystery feels the same color as October.

I remember some of the dream now. Cursed objects, some having appeared in dreams past. A forest, some music, dry heat and earth. Paced like an old horror movie, with a real sense of fear, but no fear itself.

1:02PM

J and I went to Cin's to watch the LCS, Dodgers vs. Mets. The streets were fuller than expected, but the day was beautiful, cloudless and slightly biting. We prepared a big pot of clams in white wine and butter, and I had a thought born from sudden craving that I should have brought miso and wakame instead of just parsley, but this will do. Cin made a scallop crudo in a sauce reminiscent of yuzu kosho, and we watched the Dodgers lose to the Mets. We talked at length of Cin and Niz's trip to the Bay, where they spent time with Cin's family, and of weddings and traditional expectations of them, and frustrations and families one doesn't choose. I guess it can't be helped; being born into a post-war Viet family simply means complex feelings of duty to and rebellion of them, and a shuddering hurt every time no matter how routine it becomes. Niz brought out a strange gift they received from an uncle during the trip, a large nightlight of twisted woodwork around what looked like a heavy oval acrylic paperweight with a figure inside. It was a shark, they said. I took a look and told them it was actually a tuna, which made the thing even stranger and funnier, and we laughed about it, testing the light and trying to determine what to do with it. 4:46PM Finally home, with the slightest wine-drunk from the afternoon. There was a package for me, I knew what it was: a runway Comme des Garcons dress from SS2000, long and black and slightly sheer. I went to try it on and saw it had a leather belt attached to the inside which wasn't pictured, and was a little taken aback. A beautiful dress surely meant to be worn many different ways, but I had only intended to wear it as a dress and was unsure if I really liked any of the configurations I came up with using the belt. Relaxed, the belt made the dress so heavy. I'll try again tomorrow and decide if I should keep it. In the past, I've altered or changed even old runway pieces to fit the way I want to wear them, but for some reason, it felt wrong to do it with this dress ..

--

Reading - The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevky Listening - kisses, Slowdive The Ghost of You, My Chemical Romance Love Don't Dance Here Anymore, Tiga Marquee Moon, Television Pretty When You Cry, Lana Del Rey

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10/13/24 fin de siècle

1:42PM

In the morning, the sky was heavy with grey, and colder than it had been all of October. Drowsy excitement settled in. The end of summer. My mind has a way of attaching certain phrases to itself and ruminating on them constantly until they've been worn down to a sort of whisper of the idea, and so the entire day I was driven by the fast-approaching death of summer. The death of summer. The death of summer.

End of summer .. I need to eat a sandwich. With softshell crab or something else that will be out of reach soon. I need to sit outside, or somewhere inside with lots of light.

Found Oyster - J and I were craving it. So we went after hastily getting dressed - a Junya Watanabe miniskirt with a hidden zipper that always gets stuck the first try, an old Margiela sweater, my Ann D riding boots, purposefully half a size too big. (I have a habit of always needing to mentally catalog what I wear with somewhat great detail; apologies for anyone coming across these posts who feels tired of it ... I just love clothes this way.) We got to Found Oyster right at opening because there's always a chance of a wait, and chose the two bar seats at the corner nearest to the wine refrigerator, where we sat the last few times we were here. I thought about asking for a matchbook but abandoned the idea. The waitress asked me about my bag and I quickly said it was "Yohji", and felt a bit of embarrassment for not saying the full name. I hoped she understood I wasn't trying to feign familiarity - I simply have a stutter that stuck the name somewhere in my throat where it couldn't get out .. This time I wanted a sandwich. So it was a half dozen ME oysters and a fried cod sandwich, and a lobster roll, and little clam chowders. A Ghia lime soda. J had a beer as usual. I notice many of the diners at the bar know the cooks by name, and I find it sweet, somewhat rare in a place like this. I make a mental note to come back on a future weekday evening since I work close by, because I had a sudden desire eat bread and butter and boquerones but was too full. we were going to pick up a fried fish to have for dinner with some nước chấm and rice but were too full, so we just went home to nap before watching Dodgers vs Mets LCS game 1, as the sunset began to lay down lower in the sky, just over the treetops and apartments outside.

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9/18/24 exemplary artistic suffering

1:35PM

I have a long day ahead - West Hollywood, then Atwater, then something else that I haven’t decided on yet, and then K-Town for dinner. I’ve been feeling unwell. Perhaps it’s the hot weather headache that just hasn’t gone away since the heat dome sat atop LA last week. Perhaps I’m just tired, and sick in my soul. Nothing has felt right. I can’t decide on a jacket, and my hair is getting too long. I decided to wear my Marc Le Bihan to try to get some use out of it.

After finishing an errand in Weho, I quickly decide to get out of there. I’ve always disliked it here; there’s nothing wrong with it, and actually, it’s a good area with plenty of things to see, places to sit and have a coffee or a drink, parks to read at. But there’s a decidedly strange energy about the place, like there’s just a little more sun than there should be naturally, the whites a little too stark, and the murals a little too clever and modern. So I drive to Los Feliz, squinting against that ghastly light, feeling calmer as the facades at each block crossing grew more and more familiar. I listen to the same few Saosin songs over and over again. Finally I’m there - I grab my book and a seat at the far end of the counter at Bar Sinizki, because it’s one of the only places of its kind I can think of that’s open at 2PM on a Wednesday.

2:16PM

Literature, Isolation, Suicide - the three modes of exemplary artistic suffering. I’m trying to read - Susan Sontag’s Against Intepretation and other essays - but there are some others here, too. Sontag is already difficult for me to read so I have to go slowly, to focus and sometimes to reread sentences four times, but the noisy man at the other end of the bar can’t stop talking about Joshua Tree to anyone who will listen, in this case the bartender. I keep fidgeting with the mint in my caipirinha, and order some fries. The man is still talking about Joshua Tree, insisting everyone in LA does not go to the desert as much as they should. He seems an older man, and I think to myself, does he really think no one in this city goes to Joshua Tree? How silly!

2:56PM

Eventually the man leaves, lifetimes after he’s finished his coffee. Every so often more people shuffle in and out, requesting seats outside, sharing martinis at the bar, a manager, a couple of friends, a woman who insists to her friend that she can’t order any food because she’s already eaten so much that day. I keep reading my book. Another man sits in the place the Joshua Tree believer had vacated, with his own book, a rather alarmingly oversized paperback, which he pores over quietly. Some hospitality industry people walk in and joke with the bartender about really good beers and their comte-and-ham sandwiches and the recent status of green chartreuse as a grey-market good. I wonder what drink has recently become so popular so as to deplete the city .. My mind goes back to my book.

3:52PM

More Saosin in the car. I take a few wrong turns to Sunset junction. ML gave me a candle shaped like a baguette, which I found very funny and carried around with me. We mill about the new Wasteland - these days i don't have much of an interest in shopping, so I'm quite bored. ML bought a Marina Eerie corset.

There was some time before dinner, so I said we should go to Barr Seco, which opened a few weeks ago. It's smaller than expected, with a good counter, but also the ubiquitous and almost tiresome green subway tile accents. The girl next to me was reading Dune. I was still feeling a bit of the vesper, so I asked her how she liked it, but thinking back I feel quite embarrassed for bothering someone in that way.

I had a glass of skin contact, and ML and I shared a hamachi crudo in brown butter. I'm starting to feel myself shut down, and I don't perceive the rest of the day in full ...

drove to KTown, listening to Saosin the entire way .. raw marinated crab, talking about activations. These conversations are so hard to focus on ... My mind keeps wandering

Kept driving without thinking … ended up downtown outside staples center

I don't remember much else

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9/10/24 more of less

11:39AM

It’s been so hot in LA. Of course, everyone already knows this, because people in LA love discussing weather. Like the few weeks last February, when it rained for two weeks straight, and all anyone could talk about was the rain, how it flooded Sunset, how California needed a storm like this. Today should be the last day of the heat wave, and then the city will plod slowly into fall, or at least I hope it will.

I've always hated summer. This year we didn’t really have any hot days until this current wave, the kinds that fill the apartment with an unsettling cloud of lightdrunk dust and musk, and all you can do is lay under it, and listen absentmindedly to records, and absorb nothing about the music because your mind keeps wandering. I hate these days because my thoughts crystallize around annoyances and anxieties, and I make plans, never-before and never-again type plans. I start to crave solitude in a way I normally wouldn’t — yearning for when I was twenty-four, and the specific loneliness of it, the drives home from work facing a setting sun, listening to Lana or Television on repeat. The way I cried easily, how my eyes would fill with tears for no reason at all, how it felt so significant and devastatingly important, how it shrunk the world around me so that it wasn’t a stranger anymore. Then I promise myself I’ll seek solitude more often, maybe two or three times a week, after work in Hollywood, at a bar at 5PM so I can try to read regularly again. More walks, more reading, more silence, more of less. But I know as soon as the weather cools, I’ll stop feeling this way, and I’ll go to bars with J and try to be a better friend and answer texts more regularly, and forget that I ever missed being alone.

2:56PM

Tried to paint my nails but found my topcoat had run out. It’s the last day of this heat wave. It’s so hard to think of anything else.

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8/29/24 eyes closed tight at the dying breath of summer

I guess I’ll try this thing. 

6:58AM

Woke up later than I wanted to, and had a brief panic over the way it was already blue in my room. Not black, not gray, but blue. Mulled over a few dozen excuses to take the morning off, and thought better of it. As I took my morning shower, which I always take in the dark, I thought about needing a haircut, and a trip to the dentist. I thought about a Yohji sweater I’ve been keeping an eye on for a few weeks .. should I buy it when I get paid tomorrow? No, not yet. I try to put it out of mind, but Yohji Yamamoto has a way of holding on. 

8:00AM

Trying the Fara Homidi concealer in Ochre, and lightly annoyed by how nice it is. My mother always said I liked nice things a little too much, ever since I was a child. I fix my eyebrows and use up the last Dior Lipglow I’ll ever have. 

1:21PM

Lunch - made a sandwich, salami on baguette, with arugula dressed in oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper, muenster. Some cornichons on the side. I don’t really like sandwiches but I keep trying to eat them.

4:22PM

Some mail I’ve been waiting for came today: an Ann Demeulemeester dress from SS2000, with the beaded Patti Smith quotes on hidden straps (mine says “EYES CLOSED TIGHT”), and an AW1999 Helmut Lang tee with the padded astro details at the elbows. Both black. The last time I found a piece from Ann Demeulemeester SS2000, I was maybe eighteen, and it was a white shirt with the quote “ARMS OUTSTRETCHED”, and I hadn’t read Woolgathering yet. I remember loving these words together for what they were, all the suggestion and intent that they pulled themselves over. I wore that shirt all the time. I thought about those words all the time. This is rather trite, but thinking about Patti Smith, especially in regards to her words on some clothes, is making me overly aware of the passing of the years. Maybe it’s because the first time I came across her words was so impactful, or maybe because seeing them there, sewn down in glass beads again, for only the second time in my life, has thrown a light behind the twelve years in between. I’m not very sentimental anymore, but admittedly I miss being eighteen. Even more than being eighteen, I miss knowing what it felt like.

sometime in the evening

The falling light always makes me a little thirsty, especially for something cold and crisp, usually gin, or a white wine. Maybe everyone is this way. I want to try a new bar in Silverlake tomorrow evening after work because I haven’t had a good glass of wine in a long time, and because I saw that they serve butter and bread (not bread and butter) on little silver trays that look like mirrors. The Dodgers will be in Arizona tomorrow, so tomorrow night feels right. Soon. Lately I’ve been drawn to new bars, a counter burger or a steak frites, anonymity, being surrounded by strangers, which explains the uncharacteristic appetite I’ve had lately for Bar Sinizski and Holy Basil and the like … at Lolo or Etra, I would have to gather myself to reply in kind to the familiar questions about work and music and weather and “are you still in Studio City?” until the thinned silence inevitably follows. At Bar Sinizki I can hide in a corner and choose a cocktail at random because they’re all good, and sit with the emptiest mind I can muster. I think that’s why I’m so fond of it.