They stopped at a metal gate flanked on both sides by a high wooden fence, a voice glitching over the intercom. Simon repeated his name twice before the gate swung open and they drove in on the pale gravel. Directly ahead, a semicircle of cars was parked in front of the main house. Alex could see a tennis court, a pool behind a smaller gate.
Alex kept her face blank and mild, though she felt a jolt at the obvious nearness of the sea. She poked her tongue along her top teeth, feeling for anything errant.
Simon cut the ignition. “Shall we?”
The door of the main house opened and a pug came trotting toward them. A man in a black polo and black pants followed, but the pug got there first, clamoring around Alex’s ankles.
“Welcome,” the man said. “This way.”
There were candles flickering inside the house in big hurricane vases. Even so, the entryway was too dark, disorienting after the sunshine. Alex turned to make sure Simon was behind her.
“Onward and upward,” Simon said, his voice echoing strangely, the pug’s nails clicking along the marble.
The big room that led to the patio seemed partially filled with mist, a dampness from the fog that had breached the windows. Beyond the patio was the spread of the ocean. The sun would set soon, the light already faltering.
The patio door was open. There, framed in the doorway, was Helen.
She was all in black, a sleeveless dress with a kind of cape hanging down the back. Her blond hair was pulled tight in a bun at her neck. How old was she? Alex couldn’t quite tell—her skin had been professionally blasted into the face of a bland 30-year-old. Her dark eyes wobbled until they finally focused on Simon and Alex.
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Canvas the City - Martha Diamond captured the brisk energy of Manhattan.
How do you capture a city as frenetic as New York? For the late artist Martha Diamond, it meant looking up. In her soulful paintings of New York City’s skyscrapers, Diamond used loose ropes of color that land somewhere between abstraction and figuration. Though sparse in detail, her buildings teem, as the city does, with life. Diamond made most of her paintings in her loft on the Bowery, where she lived from 1969 until her death last December, at age 79. Throughout her five-decade career, she didn’t so much re-create what she saw as channel its slippery essence. “I know the city has straight lines or edges,” she said in 1989, “but as I walk around, the ending or beginning of substance becomes less absolute.” Her buildings sway in the wind and glisten in the light. “I think her work is still startling,” says poet Eileen Myles, who was a longtime friend of Diamond’s. “It’s there to wake people up.”
Off the Beat - Mainly known as a producer, O'Connell Finneas is releasing a new heartfelt LP.
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Spinning a Web - Not muscle, not bone, but fascia the network of tissue that connects it all is grabbing the therapeutic spotlight.
Are you in pain?” Cadence Dubus, a Brooklyn-based fitness instructor who has developed a program for “fascia release,” asks, sending me spiraling before our session begins. There’s that twinge in my shoulder and the carpal tunnel at night—but aren’t such annoyances simply the conditions of modern life, of getting older? “Some,” I answer, shy to cop to any of it. Dubus then has me walk back and forth, squinting at my gait.
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It was late in the summer in Los Angeles, with all the dry heat and burnished sunlight that implies, and Billie Eilish was sitting in a dark room, busy changing her mind. The singer was halfway through editing the music video she had directed for “Birds of a Feather,” her latest astronomically successful hit song (nearly 1 billion streams) off her latest astronomically successful hit album (nearly 4 billion streams at the time), when she encountered a problem: She realized she hated it. Well, not hated. “I was like, this ain’t it,” she says.
Coming Up Rosy - The new blush isn't just for the cheek. Coco Mellors feels the flush.
If the eyes are the window to the soul, then our cheeks are the back door. What other part of the body so readily reveals our hidden emotions? Embarrassment, exuberance, delight, desire, all instantly communicated with a rush of blood. It's no wonder that blush has been a mainstay of makeup bags for decades: Ancient Egyptians used ground ochre to heighten their color; Queen Elizabeth I dabbed her cheeks with red dye and mercuric sulfide (which, combined with the vinegar and lead concoction she used to achieve her ivory pallor, is believed to have given her blood poisoning); flappers applied blush in dramatic circles to achieve a doll-like complexion, even adding it to their knees to draw attention to their shorter hemlines
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A trio of novels spirits you far away.
The Wizard
Paul Tazewell’s costumes for the film adaptation of Wicked conjure their own kind of magic.
THE SEA, THE SEA
A story of survival on a whaling ship sets sail on Broadway. Robert Sullivan meets the crew behind the rousing folk musical Swept Away.
STAGING A COMEBACK
Harlem's National Black Theatre has been a storied arts institution in need of support. A soaring new home is shaping its future.
Simon Says
Simon Porte Jacquemus, much like his label, resonates with the sunny, breezy French South-but behind the good life, as Nathan Heller discovers, is a laser focus and a shoulder-to-the-wheel work ethic.
