Trip Planning

My go-to trip planning website is tripit.com. It's great--you can just forward your confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com and the website automatically generates a (almost always) accurate itinerary. You can also manually input activities, transportation, etc.

On December 18th, I'm going to Barcelona. Last time I went, I did all the tourist stuff on my list--Parque Guell, Sagrada Familia, Bocateria, Picasso Museum--and I'd like to repeat most of it with some additions. There are few websites that I count on for trip planning since I almost never use a guidebook:

gridskipper

NYT travel

le cool

tripadvisor

and for bookings:

hostelworld

kayak.com

skyscanner.com

Sometimes I feel a little undergrad-y using hostelworld, but it's actually a super useful search site. I pretty much never use it to find hostels. You can select for apartments, b&bs, and budget hotels, and since vacation apartment renting is ubiquitous in Barcelona, I found a cheap, nice looking apartment in the city center through hostelworld which I definitely wouldn't have discovered otherwise. In conclusion, I would be a wasted shell of a human being without the internet.

Madrid's Marais

When I read this NYT article about Calle Conde Duque in July, I got really, really excited about living in Madrid. When I moved into my apartment next to Arguelles metro, I didn't realize that I was a five minute walk from Conde Duque. I am! I teach at a school literally one street over from CD, so I walk around there about every other day. After a couple of months in my flat, I've been to every place on the NYT list without making any particular effort. Yesterday I talked to the owner of one of the Grupo Deportivo stores, and recommended that he look into Hollander and Lexar, where Dotts and I befriended our photogenic friend last year. I hope some kind of transatlantic connection is made because those stores are perfect complements.

The photo above is of El Jardin Secreto, which I tried for the first time a couple of weeks ago and loved. I had a super sweet Bailey's based cocktail, some arroz negro and a cheese plate. Last night, I went to La Dichosa nearby, which would've fit into the NYT article nicely. It was lively, pretty, and cheap--5 drinks (not all mine) and a cheese+ham plate for 23 euros. Can't beat that. They had an interesting drink selection, all written in chalk on the black wall behind the bar: vermouth, basque cider, Mahou negra (the lighter, Spanish version of Guinness) and my embarrassing favorite, cava.

Conde Duque, I love you. I can walk there, it's reasonably priced, it's authentic, it's low key and pretty and lively. I basically want to go out there every night.

Hotel Chevalier and asianpunkboy

I am in Paris for the weekend with my friend Whitney. It's Paris this weekend because my friend, Chris, is starting a magazine and asked me to write a review for it on Terence Koh's show Adonsonias in Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac's Paris shop.

The magazine is called Revelader. Here's a bit about it:

Revelader is a curated arts and culture magazine, with an equal emphasis on the artful presentation of 'found' work and original arts criticism. Our first issue is themed "whitelight/blackmountain" and will be published in November. It will be centered around ideas of white, light, black, bright, positive/negative space, color, etc., and t will include a profile of the late historian of optics A.I. Sabra, a retrospective on Robert Rauschenberg and the Black Mountain school of painters, a review of Terence Koh's upcoming exhibit at Thaddeaus Ropac in Paris (right?), poems by and an interview with Cherokee poet Marilou Awiakta, photo-essays on Chicago and Croatia, new prints by Kate Mccgwire, collages by Nicky Stewart, interviews with ROBA designers in Zagreb and illustrator Patray Lui in Amsterdam, a feature on 19th century Southern type foundries, and a few pieces of new fiction and poetry.

Whitney and I are staying in a place we don't deserve which is larger, I'm fairly certain, than our apartment in Madrid. It reminds me of Hotel Chevalier, except the robes are not yellow. That was unrealistic anyway, wasn't it?




Last night for dinner we went to a place in Le Marais called Robert et Louise. Upstairs, they roast beef, veal, kidneys and duck in an open hearth and serve it to you, practically alive, on a wooden plate. We sat downstairs in a humid and warm and bright former wine cellar, at a shared table. At first we tried to pretend that we weren't at a shared table, but when we found out that the beautiful french girl across from us spoke nearly perfect English, we all loosened up. She was meeting a friend of hers from London who she hadn't seen in a long time, and two Parisian friends of hers, men, joined as well. Morad and Scott. Morad is working on his art history PhD, so Whitney and he had a lot to talk about, and Scott does drawings and logos.

Whitney's been accusing me of fake speaking french, but my swallowed r's and l's got us to Veille de Temple, and ordered me a delicious kir. More later.

Steel Wool Will

And now for a test of nerves and rhetoric to dwarf even the hour-long Iberian screaming match when I attempted to return a broken modem to Vodafone: today, I'm opening a bank account.

The Opposite of Success

Misery misery son of a bitch of all miseries. Madrid Airport defeated me. I mean defeated. Completely defeated. Is there any other way to say it? No, there is not. Defeated, completely.

A third party could, I guess, say that I did not complete every last single necessary step to ensure succesful boarding at the gate. He might say that a more attentive passenger would have heeded multiple emails from the airline--full, as they were, of the most tediously small fonts--emails advising about some boarding pass stamp. Still, I do not know its name or exact purpose.

The flimsiest of operations! A spiny haired, self-loathing twenty-five or twenty-eight year old man, who wasn´t altogether unattractive, but still, a man who clearly rued the day that RyanAir ever burst into existence, this character took a fleeting look at my passport and stamped my boarding pass. It took one minute. Less. This was, of course, as my flight was departing. And I was hardly looking my best, and I was certainly not on my best, airport, good citizen type behavior. Sweating like a whipped horse and my hair crazy and everywhere. In actual fact, I looked more like a security threat in that moment than in any other moment in my life. Huffingly--that is to say, out of breath--demanding idiotic bureaucratic stamps, cutting the line at security. If my hair had been covered--forget it!

In any case, I´m flying to London today instead.

A Bad Beginning

"Benito was not happy with me. No, Benito was mad. The truth is, yes, I was out drinking with Yusuke-san, until 3 a.m., and I was tired. I don’t expect Benito to sympathize with a hangover—he’s clearly not the type—but what I mean to say is that I wasn’t trying to somehow dupe Benito. Because I wasn’t. Was it my fault that the washing machine couldn’t be operated by myself, Eber or even according to the housekeeper’s instructions by phone? And that the difference between fabric softener and laundry soap is not entirely clear in this country? Did I demand that Benito come over and demonstrate how to use the washing machine? No. I did not. He elected to do this."

And is it my fault that my ATM card has a withdrawal limit of $500 a day? And that USAA bank doesn’t accept long distance calls from Sprint PCS? It’s a burden to call Eric, ask him to call USAA, and force him to wait on the line until my business has been transacted. There is a rigorous health care debate in Congress currently! He has a job to do!"

Of course, it’s all a question of expectations. Naturally when Benito expects to receive 1,000 euros, in cash, on Friday, and he only receives 300—naturally, there will be some conflict. Expectations were not met, I understand. But does the conflict really call for so much tension? There was tension between Benito and I. Tension, friction, and recrimination. Benito, does my lack of a passport photocopy actually defy logic? If you only knew! I was turned away at not one or two but three inscrutable looking stores in my search for a photocopier. You know my job hasn’t started yet and I don’t have daily access to a photocopier. The customs of your homeland are a mystery to me. You know this to be true! And yet you still threaten to take back the set of keys you gave me."

I’m sorry to say, Benito, that in the United States of America, this just isn’t how business is done. Ever heard of innocent until proven guilty? Benito, please, have a some faith in your fellow human being. The kind of accusations and implications that were exchanged here today—I cannot help but take them to heart. You have wounded me, Benito. I hope we can overcome it."

I have a place to live!

24 hours after arriving in Madrid, I signed for the apartment I was raving about last night. I'm sort of beside myself with excitement. I move in on Friday. Friday!

I'm not going to go on too much about it now because

1. I don't have any pictures yet

2. What if there's been some terrible misunderstanding and I end up homeless

But, I will say that it has two terraces, two bathrooms, also, a bathtub, and it's in the Arguelles neighborhood, on Calle de Alberto Aguilera just down the street from Zara. Google map here.

A la victoria! Si! Bailamos.

I MOVED TO SPAIN!

So, I live in Madrid now. After frantically buying into a T-Mobile hotspot in the Frankfurt Airport with the fervor of a crack addict coming down, I reported a smooth international transition. Ha!

When my ATM card couldn't produce cash at the taxi stand in Barajas Airport, a near-complete emotional meltdown erupted. Several calls were made at an international pay phone a few yards away from the withering looks of the information booth attendant who, after looking at my 250 pounds of luggage stacked up to head-height on a squeaky cart, told me that the currency exchange counter was, in fact, in Terminal 1, and I was in Terminal 3. And I would not, under any circumstances that she could dream up, haul a large American man's worth of clothes from Terminal 1 to Terminal 3 to get my currency changed.

On the phone with USAA bank representative Laura, I fairly convincingly portrayed an abductee caught in some poorly planned human trafficking scheme. This was not my intent. That is to say, when she asked, "Are you alright?" in response to my shrill, tearful request to "turn on my debit card in Europe please," I did not mean to give the impression that a mulleted kidnapper was holding me at gunpoint. Although, in retrospect, that's probably what it sounded like.

When I finally arrived at Hostal Tijcal, just off the Plaza Mayor and next to Sol metro station, I filled the tiny one-and-a-half-person wide elevator with an...aspirational amount of luggage. Before liftoff, a heaping pile of my suitcases toppled over, trapping me inside the the little utility closet of an elevator. You know when a man is trapped underneath an overturned vehicle, and some 80 year old woman comes along and, with a rush of adrenaline, lifts the two-axle car and frees the captive victim? That's more or less what happened inside of the elevator. Multiple trips, with the attendant more realistic luggage loads, were then required.

Now it's 10 PM, and I've just returned from looking at pisos with my future roommate, Margit (one more roommate, Whitney, is on the way). We saw a light-filled, pretty big atico (Spanish for penthouse!! sort of) apartment with a huge terrace, two bathrooms, and a bathtub. A bathtub! De lujo! I've been charged with meeting the owner tomorrow morning in my most responsible looking outfit. We're crossing our fingers--it would be ideal to have a piso signed for by Friday.

Going to meet Keith, my senior year homecoming date, for drinks in Plaza Mayor now. He's lived here for a couple of years and I haven't seen him since high school. Also, I'm jet lagged. But I love it here so far.

C

In Memory of Senator Kennedy

"a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."

(In 2008 I met DC photographer, Josh Cogan, at a show of his at the 6th and I synagogue downtown. This photo of Senator Kennedy struck me, and I put Josh in touch with Kennedy's office to offer the senator a print. I'm glad that happened.) Photo copyright Josh Cogan, http://www.joshuacogan.com/

Presidents Pitching

From the Telegraph

LBJ All the Way

Want

Ways I spend my internet love:

LivingSocial.com deals like what I got today: $10 for $45 worth of fresh flowers @ Ultra Violet in DC. Yes!Seriously appreciating Standard Deviation NYC for shorts such as these.
Brooks Brothers summer clearance, up to 60% off.





theOutnet.com,
net-a-porter's outlet site. There's a "flash sale" on dresses going on right now, 60-80% off A. McQueen, Narisco Rodriguez, Anna Sui, Oscar de la Renta, etc. You have to register to access the sale, but it may be super, super worth it. There was a cute white Anna Sui dress for $86!

Benzine

This morning, I Googled "alenda lux", the first part of the Davidson College motto "Alenda Lux Ubi Orta Libertas", because I'd forgotten it. Treasures resulted.

The first is a blog called, naturally, "Alenda Lux", and it's written by someone who might be a Davidson student but who's definitely worked a lot of retail. Although her pink and purple starry background is not my favorite, and reminds me of my little pony and pretty pretty princess, the sub-header she uses, "Bliss it was to be alive, but to be young was very heaven" is great. I look forward to learning more about her well-chronicled young life.

The second comes from an online magazine called the Ben McAuley Appreciation Society. In his article, Reggie Chamberlain-King talks about the way we talk about the way we talk these days. Complaints about the degradation of the English language, and all of that. What a small, random little magazine I've found. So far, the writing is quite good.


Maybe in the afternoon I'll Google search "ubi orta libertas" and see what that turns up.

Regret and Remorse

Regret is a thicket

of leafy vine. Ivy knitted

across a red brick house,

regret makes recall a little sweeter.

Proper chances missed,

nervy risks mistook.

Badly spent nights

each in our cages, regret

hooks in the meat

of sadness, too.

Fond thoughts

on my lover’s smallish nose, or hip bone

ferment, regrettably, to cheap red wine.

If only remorse,

a long goodbye; a violent tongue,

could be so falsely fine.

Dave Hickey on Las Vegas, Attention

Dave Hickey's essay collection Air Guitar arrived in the mail yesterday and I read the first few pages today, at just the right time.

"America is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America.

What is hidden elsewhere exists here in quotidian visibility. So when you fly out of Las Vegas to, say, Milwaukee, the absences imposed by repression are like holes in your vision. They become breathtakingly perceptible, and, as a consequence, there is no better place that Las Vegas for a traveler to feel at home.

The town has a quick, feral glamour that is hard to localize--and it arises, I think, out of the suppression of social difference rather than their exacerbation. The whole city floats on a sleek frisson of anxiety and promise that those of us addicted to such distraction must otherwise induce by motion or medication."

Good Stuff Round-Up

Picture: Hank Williams III

Poem: "Advice to a Pregnant Daughter-in-Law"

Dress: Alexander McQueen @ Shrimpton Couture

Welcome to the circus: Why I <3 My Mentor

Suck it, SCOTUS. You'll never see action like this.


"Ringmaster: No clowning at this circus"
Dallas Morning News
June 23, 2009


Everybody who showed up for Day One of the highly anticipated Dallas City Hall corruption trial quickly found out about the ringmaster: the no-nonsense woman in the robe.

The revelation occurred before folks could fall asleep waiting, you know, for something B-I-G to happen during the first day of jury selection.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Lynn got this three-ring circus of a trial off the ground by cracking her legal whip at those who dared to defy a gag order she threw down 10 days ago.
"The court regards this as a very serious matter," Lynn sternly admonished high-profile defendant Don Hill, a former council member who once had ambitious designs on the mayor's office.

"I won't prejudge whether it is criminal contempt," said Lynn, who set a Nov. 2 hearing on whether Hill and his attorney, Ray Jackson, should be held in contempt of court for gabbing with reporters last week.

To be clear, Lynn told Hill that if he didn't put a sock in it and stop hamming it up with reporters, she'd sock it to him next time.

"If you do [speak to the media about this case], you will immediately be taken into custody," Lynn said.

P.T. Barnum would pay to see that exchange.

Alas, Hill, who spent much of the morning standing around with his hands in his pinstriped suit pockets talking to Jackson or other defendants, including his wife, Sheila Farrington, shrugged and uttered few words.

"I can't say anything," he told me when I asked during a break if he could comment on how things were going. "I can say hello, and that's pretty much it. I'm not even sure we can talk about sports."

Hill and other defendants who've pleaded not guilty apparently were thrown a knuckleball when Brian Potashnik, the housing developer at the center of the corruption scandal, didn't show for the first day of trial on the 15th floor of the Earle Cabell Federal Building.

Potashnik and his wife, Cheryl, who also didn't show, are accused of bribing Hill and others to benefit the Potashniks' low-income housing projects.

When two featured acts fail to come under the tent, that can only lead to endless chatter in the peanut gallery, with most speculating the Potashniks had willingly climbed in the cage with federal prosecutors.

"In this situation, it's fair to speculate that there may be a plea agreement in place," said John Ratcliffe, a former U.S. attorney, now in private practice, who is monitoring the trial and was ambushed by reporters who were kicked out of the standing-room-only courtroom when jury selection began. "If there is a plea, that would be a very significant development."
If the Potashniks rolled over, that may very well enable jurors to get back to their families before summer's end.

"It makes the government's work easier," Ratcliffe said.

At one point, about 25 minutes after the judge had returned to the courtroom, a defense attorney handed a folded note to a prosecutor, who smiled and showed it to others on his team.
I thought something was about to break. Nothing happened.

The prosecution team looked eager and intimidating, with several spiraled, three-ring notebooks stacked neatly in front of them. I suspect they were trying to send a clear message to prospective jurors that they were loaded for bear.

Which is why I got a kick out of seeing Jackson, Hill's attorney, stand up, lift his chair over his head and carry it to the other side of the defense table, where he then sat and calmly adjusted his red tie.

Too bad the sketch artists, the real stars of the first day's action, didn't capture that move. They had other concerns.

Gregory Conlin, commissioned by three TV stations to capture courtroom images, found out how tough Lynn is.

"I hope she's not too mad at me," Conlin said as he finished a drawing of the judge while sitting just outside her court on a bench. "I apparently didn't get out of the room fast enough when she said it the first time. I was too busy drawing.

Conlin, 58, said he was packing up "as quickly as I could" when Lynn chided him. "She stopped me on the way out and said, 'Excuse me, did you not hear me the first time?' I hope she lets me back in. I need the work."

She did, only to ask him and others to leave again once jury selection began.

"You talk about adverse conditions," Conlin said, packing up his gear once again.

Welcome to the circus.

HuffPo: Why Google Bothered to Appeal a $761 Small Claims Case (and Won)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_213176.html

Vintage and Designer on Etsy.com: Austin

Creepy baby @ 47th St. Supply Co.

Spanish dancer lithograph @ 47th St. Supply co.

Sweet tooth/angry tooth @ Niku

Plague of locusts cardigan, $35 @ artloaf

These purple suede boots are made for Maxine.

Boots @ 11eggs only $39!

Simple black dress with pretty + casual draping. $25 @ 11 eggs.

West Texas

This I Believe

1. When it comes to love, men who put more stock in logic than in lust should not be trusted.

Unrelatedly, Matthew Day Jackson is cute.

Kafka + Salinger

"The actors by their presence always convince me, to my horror, that most of what I've written about them until now is false. It is false because I write about them with steadfast love (even now, while I write it down, this, too, becomes false) but varying ability, and this varying ability does not hit off the real actors loudly and correctly but loses itself dully in this love that will never be satisfied with the ability and therefore thinks it is protecting the actors by preventing this ability from exercising itself."


Franz Kafka, in J.D. Salinger (1963): "Seymore: An Introduction"

Slay me

The Titanic

So this is how it feels, the deck tilting,
the world slipping away as one
sitting at a desk writes a check.

The Titanic went down titanically
like a goddess glittering,
Pinioned to an iceberg, she sank

almost thankfully while tiny mortals
leapt into the sea
and the band played Nearer My God to Thee.

But what happened to the signals of distress?
Nobody believed it was all really happening.
I still can’t believe that it happened to me.

As a child, I stared horrified at the photograph
and the vision of that scene in the moonlit sea.
We will be one of the survivors, we think,
then something looms up like catastrophe.

All life, it seems, is the morning after
and love is the most beautiful of absolute disasters.

by June Robertson Beisch

The Nature of Intent; Getting what we want

"It is evil to hide your intentions."

Friend Eliza has a documentary on the font Helvetica, and in one of the interviews at a graphic design firm, the artist sits in front of a wall covered in art and posters. One of the more prominent posters reads "It is evil to hide your intentions" or, "to hide your intentions is immoral," or something like that. It's been in my brain for weeks now. It is evil to hide your intentions.

Is it? The phrase has an arresting ring of truth.

Since I was very young, I've been insistent on hiding my intentions. My intentions were usually pretty innocuous--eating Twizzlers illicitly in the living room, leaving the house without making my bed, ending the torture of brussel sprouts at dinner. My processes for hiding these intentions varied. Starting at around age six, I would partially chew my vegetables under the watchful eye of my parents at dinner, and then when their attentions were fixed on my baby brother, I'd scurry to the bathroom and spit out the greens into a wad of napkins, which I left in the trash can. It was gross. When I wanted to sneak candy into a room where candy wasn't allowed, I would hide the stuff in my waistband and cover it with my shirt, casually walking by my parents as smoothly as possible to hush the crunching of a plastic wrapper.

In hiding my intentions, my objective was to avoid whatever was unpleasant and to ensure acesss to whatever I cherished, without regard to the rules. Sometimes I was caught, but most of the time it worked out pretty well.

As I've grown older, I've folded this pattern of dissembling into my behavior in subtler and systemic ways, mostly without realizing I'm doing it. The rule-makers of my childhood unwittingly rewarded my obfuscations often enough to make a habit out of the hiding appear beneficial. When I read the line, "It is evil to hide your intentions", I experienced that pang of shame so particular to discovering that someone has caught you in a personal, embarrassing act--picking your nose, say, or credit card debt. In that moment, I realized that often, when I'm trying to get something I want, my first impulse is to hide my desire, to twist the truth, to sneak around. Which makes me feel smarmy and dishonest. Worst of all: lying usually doesn't even work. People don't like feeling manipulated or lied to; a middling liar is pretty easy to spot. Hell, even a good liar is pretty easy to spot after a few rounds.

Since my epiphanic moment, I've been trying to be more forthright. I've been trying to be as honest as possible as often as possible, specifically when it comes to getting something that I want. I'll let you know how it goes. It's slow going, but I'm trying. When I was having a psuedo-monumental moral awakening around age seventeen, I made my maxim this: "I want to be as happy as possible, but never at the expense of someone else." That's, more or less, what I'm still trying to do.

Perfection

To go with this poem.

Oxfords and Galician Lace

This post has two unrelated sections. The first is about androdge love, and the second is about my online friend who is a designer in Spain.

Androdge Love

I still can't reconcile my love for these shoes with my self-understanding, but you don't choose what you love.

D.C. via Galicia, or, online friends

If it's weird that I made a friend online, then I'm sorry. The last time that happened was circa 1996 in an AOL chat room. But my online friend, Sarai Fernandez, a gallega fashion designer, sent me a couple of her looks and I love them. Probs everyone will. I want to get her stuff into stores here in D.C.!

kiss kiss bang bang

kiss
kiss

bang

bang

Modern Poetry-->Apocalyptic literature-->Options Trading

A chronology of my obsessions over the past three years. Check it out.

Fortunately, each interest complements the other. In the event of apocalypse ushered in by a global societal meltdown due to financial collapse, I'll be well-prepared after having listened to The Road on audiobook, like, seven times. My Army Field Survival manual and backpack of non-perishable food are all ready to go. While I'm hiking through a deserted nuclear winter wasteland, I can recite to myself poems from a world whose riches are forever lost. Poetry is a hedge to currency.

It Still Feels Good to be a Gangster

I wonder what it feels like to do the exact opposite of a good job and know that the U.S. Government is on the hook for every single one of your missteps. Meritocracy is gone. Irrationally, I want to blame the Dems for pushing the bailout through, but after the way John McCain let politicos trash his legacy in the span of one campaign, I'd be surprised if he would've handled this any better.

Goldman Sachs will not return the $13 billion "bonus bailout" funneled to it via AIG because some of its investors pay taxes to the U.S. Government, just like every law-abiding investor in every single other publicly and privately traded company in the history of the stock market.

"We also have taxpayer money at Goldman Sachs and it's part of our responsibility to protect that money and not lose it."

Since the government can't even prevent $260 million of its own money from going to the financiers who hand-crafted the toxic assets that triggered this crisis, how could anyone possibly imagine that the taxpayers will have one iota of influence over any of the banks AIG is giving our money to? Even Eliot Spitzer has crawled out of his dank, sex-addled haze to damn the transaction.

Ron Paul 2012, people. Seriously.

Like a Mackerel in a Maelstrom, or a Tadpole in a Tidal Wave

Good Monday, World of Commerce that I love so much,

I want you to know that today I suffered an 8% loss gambling on a 3x leveraged short Dow ETF and paid the price this afternoon.

More important than the cash was the lesson I learned regarding the volatility and unpredictability of leveraged shorts, which some detractors argued against on moral grounds.

While I uphold my dispute as to the nature of my detractors' aspersions, perhaps somewhere deep in the snowbank of a their memories, an ember of vindication might be fanned by my small defeat during this first foray into exotic financial instruments.

Please recognize this missive as a gesture toward humility.

Yours,
Cameron

Note: This letter will be distributed via email to the appropriate parties.

People, People. We have work to do.

Jessica Simpson's systemically terrible taste has finally cemented her role as stripper fashion magnate.

Ahem: And ahoo:

This DVF "scarf dress" is extra ugnificent. It looks like a thirteen year old designed it especially to wear on Johnson Middle School's Class of '99 trip to Six Flags celebrating the end of eighth grade. Nothing is right about it. Nothing.


Recognizing that this Anna Sui dress could be categorized similarly, I defy your intepretation but confess that my attraction to all that is Anna Sui can only be mitigated in the most dire of circumstances. When I saw her Spring '06 collection floating in the windows of my favorite boutique in the world, El Savadeboda in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, instantly it was love. How fun is this? Super fun:

And a Catherine Malandrino top that's hard to feel bad about.

All I hear when I see this shell is the phrase "unabashedly appropriate", copyrighted forever by J. Crew. DVF? Make up your mind.

Portrait of a कोव्बोय व्हो क्रोस्स्द्रेस्सेस.