I bought the dress known in inner circles—that is, in the echo chamber of my closet—as the Dress in 1987, for a rehearsal dinner in New York for a couple I’ll call Peter and Sally. I found it on sale at Barney’s on Seventeenth Street. On the hanger, it looked like a long, black cigarette holder. It was February, and outside on the street, the wind was coming up Seventh Avenue. I had been married for exactly one month. That year, all my college friends were getting married. We barged from one wedding to another, carrying shoes that hurt our feet. In some cases, we knew each other all too well; sometimes the marriage was the direct result of another marriage, on the rebound: someone’s beloved had married someone else, chips were cashed. In this instance, I had hung around with the groom on and off through college, and the bride had once been the girlfriend of the man I left when I met my husband. The Dress was a sleeveless crepe de chine sheath, with a vaguely Grecian scooped neckline composed of interlocking openwork squares, which sounds dreadful but was not. It was sublime. Cut on the bias, it skimmed the body—and, it turns out, it skims everyone’s body: the Dress has been worn to the Oscars three times—in 2001, 2009, and 2018—though not by me.
Over the past few decades, bartenders have derided the Long Island Iced Tea as little more than a punchline. The slapdash consortium of spirits that make up the cocktail—usually neighbors in the slum of a bartender’s well—make strange bedfellows. But as the outside world descends into chaos, the chaotic cocktail appears to be having a moment. “On paper, the cocktail’s a mess,” says Nick Bennett, the beverage director of Porchlight Bar in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. “But if you look at the recipe, it’s really just a simple sour served as a highball.”
Egon Schiele’s images of women are challenging and varied. Some are elusive, quaint or decorative, but many are sexual, powerful, provocative. They raise unsettling questions of voyeurism and exploitation. Who were these women and what role did they play in Schiele’s life and his art? These are questions Sophie Haydock sets out to answer in her ambitious and intriguing debut novel.
In Canada, just about every urban centre holds its share of (often stunning) disappeared structures, as Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic and illustrator Raymond Biesinger reveal in 305 Lost Buildings of Canada, their delightful if slightly melancholic guide to architecture-no-longer-with-us.
For Newton the big question becomes what exactly our relationship with our ancestors is. To this end, she looks at the ways inheritance has been conceived in earlier times and by diverse cultures. Eventually, she attempts to deal with the crimes of her ancestors and, much to this reader's consternation, plunges whole-hog into mystical waters, communing with a couple of her "well" predecessors who, in turn, become agents for "repairing" the "unwell" ones.