Blessed be ‘Paper’ Magazine, who never met a cover subject they didn’t like slicked-up, oiled-down and butt-naked. Case in point is Orville Peck, who makes his cover debut in this scintillating spread. Last seen in these parts as our Dazzler of the Day, Peck is about to make more splashes thanks to some upcoming music. Stay tuned, prick up your ears, and prepare to be wowed.
There are clouds in the sky.
That’s pretty much all I have on a Tuesday morning in which I’ll be playing a brutal game of catch-up after an extra-long weekend of play and being away. More on those fun items later – for now, these clouds…
After twenty-plus years of blogging on this website, I tend to re-tread the same familiar paths, particularly when it comes to seasonal blooms. The parade of peonies happens at the same time every year, the American lilacs put on their show right before the Korean lilacs – and they go up and out here before they go up and out in Maine – and right now the Chinese dogwoods are finishing their typically-extensive “blooming” period (use of quotes for the fact that the prominent white ‘blossoms’ covering the trees now are not actual flowers, but bracts – modified leaves that give the appearance of a bloom).
When you’ve posted twenty years of dogwood trees, there’s not much more to see, other than attempting to see things from a different vantage point, like from the inside of the tree looking out.
The world is framed by foliage and ‘flowers’ when you place yourself within a tree. The best trees are those that become cozy lookouts for birds and bees and butterflies and dragonflies, providing protection when there is wind or rain or hawks about. From within the interior, the world almost looks like a manageable place.
Only when you have a safe haven like this does such a sentiment come into play – without it, you might wonder if there’s anything manageable about the world at all.
Our summer of coquetry announces itself in shades of pink and golden chains of pearls. I want so badly to escape into such frills, to go back to a time when frills were all that mattered… but I know that cannot be done. And so we go forward, with the only looking-back happening in these weekly recaps…
Not forgotten… never forgotten.
Architectural details of a peony bloom.
Bending over the carpet like Grandma.
The flowering freshness of a fruit tree.
Our one and only Dazzler of the Day was our one and only Suzie Ko.
Putting away your vacation sun hat and travel neck pillow is one of life’s sadder moments.
Putting away the luggage may be even sadder.
These bluebells were hidden in a rather untraveled woodland area of Ogunquit, off the well-tread path to and from the beach, and unbothered by the traffic and bustle of the town. Only those seeking a quieter, calmer, and less-populated area would have the fortune of happening upon these elegant flowers.
They are part of the freshness that makes this time of the year so spectacular. It will never be like this again, and it merits a pause in the quickening downhill rush toward summer.
Let this prose slow and stop too, to give you your own moment to pause and reflect.
My lifelong bestie finally gets crowned as Dazzler of the Day on this, her 49th birthday. Almost everyone visiting this post will have already met, or at least heard of, Suzie Ko. I knew Suzie before I knew just about everyone. Born a couple of months before me, she’s been in this world as long as I have, and I’ve happily never a known a day when she wasn’t here. That’s been one of the best and most comforting facts of my life, and she still makes it worthwhile going through it all.
We’ve had almost five decades of adventures together, from this legendary ‘Mary Poppins’ viewing to the day she came back from Denmark. We’ve traversed the country and the world, from Montana to Provincetown, and Russia to New York.
It hasn’t all been wild fun and laughter – Suzie taught me about heartache and loss before anyone else did, and in that respect we’ve been there for each other at the moments when only the company of a true friend could help. Sharing those times is often more important than the festive events, and the truth is that the best part of our friendship is what happens during all the down-time, the time that makes up the bulk of life – and life is simply better with Suzie in it.
Happy birthday, old friend.
Our coquette summer is off to an early start with a little reunion of the kids who attended my office’s ‘Take Your Children To Work Day’ extravaganza this year. Their group got along so well that I proposed a follow-up hang-out with a coquette theme, since the kids seemed to know more about coquette than I did, and the only way to stay young is to keep up on such themes. With that, this song from the Coquette Summer Playlist the 1st, perfect for a moon-filled night:
Emi selected this song, as she did most of the songs on the first summer playlist, and it has a lovely, laid-back vibe to it – the perfect backdrop to today’s gathering. If there is rain, that will only add to the underlying shadows of the coquette theme. it is worth remembering that behind the clouds, the moon is still there.
Saw an inspirational bumper sticker that really spoke to me the other day: If at first you don’t succeed, maybe you just suck.
It feels like we have already ripened into summer, the way it often happens when everything suddenly rushes ahead and the world that felt so barren and stark a couple of months ago is suddenly filled with foliage and flowers. We’ve passed the early end of the flowering fruit tree display – all that remains are unused photos on the phone, something that I’ll continue to share in the annoying fashion that is the essence of social media. We don’t need to make memories anymore – the phone does that for us, and the cloud is there to remind us. Somewhere between material and ethereal, our modern-day world spins.
A nostalgic throwback is best heard deeper into the evening. When dusk falls, so gloriously later in the daily run of the clock, it brings tales back to mind that may or may not have happened. In my childhood, the search for adventure or drama of any kind was a product of too many soap operas and an overactive imagination. Both were enough to sustain me through the summer, the former accompanied by fans, raspberry hard candies and Crystal Light iced tea – the latter inspired by songs that hinted at the love I was on the cusp of wanting.
I didn’t know then how lucky I was to be wanting for drama, to have to conjure and create mystery and intrigue and difficulty because nothing new seemed to be happening in my life. Such carefree days and nights are the province of youth, and largely wasted upon it.
And so I indulged in listening to songs that spoke of love and heartache and all the feelings I thought I wanted to experience first-hand. The romanticism and folly of being young… the almost-innocence of being a teenager somewhere between spring and summer…
We are scheduled to hold our first coquette-themed gathering of friends this weekend, and while sun would be ideal, the forecast calls for a cool rain. Maybe that’s more fitting for the coquette theme anyway – the underlying moodiness of it, as personified in a song like ‘Saturn’ by SZA. I have it on good authority that this song is true to the coquette aesthetic, which seems to go just slightly deeper than its beautiful outside trappings. That’s a theme that can become dear to one’s heart.
There’s a freshness at this time of the year, just as spring prepares to retire and let summer finally take her place. It’s a freshness that masks the mixed emotions that sometimes accompany a switch of seasons, so I don’t often feel the conflicted nature of the crux. Summer sun hides more than it reveals.
And I haven’t quite yet decided if I’m ready for summer – which won’t slow its arrival in the slightest, merely color how I navigate the early days. I’ll come around eventually, I usually do… In the meantime, when there are rainy days and dismal weather, I’ll turn on the coquette coziness, spray a little ‘Carnal Flower’, and bloom, bloom, bloom… while revisiting the sort of sunny day captured in these pictures.
Our peony parade was especially flamboyant this year – the best sort of thing a parade can be.
Whenever I used a parade metaphor I think of the straight guy who worked with me at Structure many years ago. Out of the blue one day he came up to me and asked if I liked parades.
“Not especially, why?” I asked with slightly-bored bemusement.
“I had a gay uncle who loved parades so I always wondered if all gay people loved parades.”
He meant well.
But the only parade I truly enjoy is a peony parade.
The last few weeks of school before summer vacation often played confusing games with my mind. As much as I wanted out, as much as I wanted the drudgery and worry and strain of school to be done, June also made me want to slow things down. Faced with the prospect of freedom, suddenly I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. There were spells of enchantment in every school year, and friends who made their mark in my life. All of us had gone through the same trauma and drama in ways that bound us to each other like no one would again. That tender part of one’s life, those formative and impressionable years – I sensed then that they might not ever be repeated, and every June I felt them slip further away.
Our playgrounds shifted and changed, from the other-worldly, gaudily-painted steel flowers and caterpillars and mushrooms of kindergarten, to the wooden climbing houses and shadowy covered slides, to the almost-adult tracks and courts of high school, just as our play moved from the outside world to the inside of our heads.
Through those high school corridors, my mind travels back into the past. The hallways feel dimmer in my head than they looked the last time I was in the building. Hazier and more dangerous too, filled with the people who tormented my mind more than they ever troubled me in person, the way most demons wreak their havoc – lazily relying on you to fill in the frightening blanks. And I would always give them more ferocity and power than they ever really held.
Though I could not see it or fully feel it at the time – there was only a vague sense of it – I held my own power too. It was there in the way most teachers appreciated my rapt attention to their every word, there in the compliments garnered from my outfits, there in the gaze of a guy who watched me change in the locker room for gym class, his eyes glued to me no matter how long I waited for him to leave before hastily pulling off my khakis and slipping into sweat pants. Power operated on all planes and playgrounds – we each had some, and we each used it in different ways. We were just starting to see, to learn, to play…
Skipping over my parents apparently, I’m turning directly into my grandmother, or so it seemed the other night when I was bending over to pick up some pieces of lint on the carpet. It brought me instantly back to my childhood, though with a decidedly more strained pain in my back and stiff legs. This was how my grandmother used to go about cleaning the carpet floors when we were kids. Back then, I marveled at her patience, and unwillingness to simply drag out the vacuum, as much as I marveled at how much cleaner the floors looked when she was done. It was my first lesson in the importance of a clean palette, and how lovely a spotless floor appeared, especially when we were accustomed to it being cluttered with toys and debris.
Like my grandmother, I find a certain satisfaction in cleaning things with thorough and detailed purpose, and as I bent down to pick up another piece of lint from the carpet, I felt her fastidious spirit flow through my Virgo hands. The magic of this carpet moment was merely, and magnificently, a memory – the mundane action of life reminding me of those who had gone.
