A slightly late round-up from last month!…and I’m not using that quote from The Great Gatsby about life starting again in the fall. Does anyone actually remember how that book ended?

Anyway! What have I been up to?

Reading: I just started Arabelle Sicardi’s The House of Beauty: Lessons from the Image Industry. (Disclosure: I’m acquainted with Arabelle and I’ve been looking forward to this one. I bought my own copy, though!)

Art: Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography at the Morgan. A centennial celebration of The New Yorker at the New York Public Library.

Video: Actual movies! Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (the Quay Brothers) and Four Nights of a Dreamer (Bresson), both at the Film Forum, both with excellent companions.

Drinks: An end-of-long-summer taste for rosé and sauvignon blanc and the occasional beer. I’ll be back to my usual cocktail self any minute now.

(Tr)eats: I stopped into Ben’s for a slice of pizza one night after some event in SoHo, after a somewhat disheartening week, and the sense of familiarity made me want to happy-cry. True comfort food for me.

Beauty Products: I just used up a few products I purchased months ago: Vacation Orange Gelée Sunscreen Gel, Sunday Riley Ceramic Slip Cleanser, MARVIS Jasmin Mint toothpaste, Crown Affair Texturizing Air-Dry Mousse, RŌZ Milk Hair Serum. I liked all of them (maybe not the mousse, so much), but for now I’m going to hold off on repurchasing, other than the RŌZ. I can truly use just this one product on my hair and still feel like it looks good. That’s rare for me.

Fragrances: Lately I’ve been in the mood for tart and sour fruit notes…rhubarb, bitter orange, red currant, overripe apricot.

Garb: I’m finally back in “regular” (non-sneaker) shoes after months of a therapist-recommended sneakers-only routine. My knee is fixed just in time for boot season, thank goodness.

Pleasures: An art-and-scent event at Joya Studio in Brooklyn’s Red Hook, with a view of the Statue of Liberty, just before sunset, with old friends (and new ones). The weird thrill (and resulting cash) of selling some barely-used perfumes on eBay.

Up Next: Writing deadlines. Back to the job boards, after some recent rejections. Prepping for gallery tours of the Ruth Asawa show at MoMA. More combinations of good art, movies, drinks, and conversations, I hope.

What have you been up to lately?

Image via Google Gemini, one of my extremely rare uses of AI (I “made” these images last December and haven’t gone back…)