Top five - 19 Feb 25

Book rec, the Miami Beach boardwalk, Philip Guston (Goldstein!), Women's Wear Daily 2002, new nail polish color

1. The Wedding People by Allison Epsach - it’s sharp, darkly funny and humbling. Pheobe is extremely educated, she’s an exquisite lead…being in her brain imbued me with sinewy academic power. She understands love with an almost unsettling clarity—seeing through its illusions while still yearning for its warmth—which makes her both deeply relatable and brutally honest. The novel’s ultimate message is humility? And capital F Freedom. I’m reminded that no matter how much I know about my life, it still has the power to surprise, undo, and remake me.
   

2. Miami Beach ROCKS and I am very happy here. The boardwalk is my happy place. It’s like this supercharged highway of bodies all capturing energy from the sun and the ocean and the exercise, so we’re all buzzing and humming past each other, using our little flesh vessels to create and distribute joy.

   

   boardwalk at dawn

   

   boardwalk with my family at dusk

3. I had no idea Philip Guston was a Jew. 13-year-old Phil Goldstein (!) published a comic strip that caught the attention of Art Spiegelman, who went on to write the graphic novel series: MAUS, a profound collection of graphic novels retelling his father’s toils in the Holocaust of WW2. Spiegelman and Philip Guston (Goldstein!) unmistakably make tense high/low art, threading the needle and pushing big red cartoony buttons. Guston (Goldstein!) draws with thick lines and sunny day colors, bulging eyeballs and dangling cigarettes, boots and coats without humans, gross looking food items and useless household stuff. The work is always charged and always makes me giddy. I’m thrilled to know that Spiegelman connected to him this way too…because I connect to Maus this way and now…in the little private den of my mind, we sit together over espresso, giggling at the burning table.

   

   

   

4. Women’s Wear Daily Vol. 184, No.65, 2002 - We just don’t get it like this anymore. The Paris fashion show calendar! The help wanted ads! The little piece about the punk musician turned painter in South London!

   

   I’d kill for a returned era of print. Thumbing through pages to search and receive information you actually want and wait for — it just sounds like a pleasure so rich and toothsome, and one I maybe never felt.

   

5. I’ve become somewhat of a nail polish enthusiast while still somehow never having my nails painted (not including the occasional test thumb). Today, I discover what I believe to be my new color: Orange Boîte from Hermès. A delight. Ultra célèbre. And while I’m one to almost always assume, I take it this color is named after their signature orange box.

   dani.worldwide

   

   A post shared by @dani.worldwide

A later visit to the Chanel counter had me very in love with a shimmery plum “191 Charmer”.

I don’t remember the name of the index finger color but it was a perfect poppy coral pink. The Hermes polish was overall just very riche and classe.

Thanks for reading! See you next top five.