Brooklyn’s Best Kept Secret: A Wes Anderson Versailles

You know that great aunt who arrives early, and overdressed, to parties? The one who smells like powdered Shalimar, and guards every single family secret under layers of costume jewellery with her life? That’s Grand Prospect Hall personified. The four-story banquet hall is the last outpost of Victorian grandeur in New York, and for nearly…

Let’s Raise a Glass to America’s Black Wall Street

Something else they forgot to tell us about in history class: Black Wall Street. Why is it that our textbooks neglected to tell us about the African Americans who opened their own banks, did business with the Rockefellers and prospered as entrepreneurs decades before the Civil Rights Movement? Yes indeed, long before desegregation, America had…

A Brief Compendium of Vintage Hollywood Test Shots

Ah, the pressures of Picture Day. Who can’t relate to the anxiety of getting that perfect shot for a yearbook, driver’s license, or, in this case, beloved Hollywood classic? For actors like Audrey Hepburn and Liz Taylor, sitting for test shots was all in a day’s work. We wish we could travel back in time…

Play the New Sheriff of this Ghost Town for Sale

Cerro Gordo was “the Silver Thread to Los Angeles,” the once violent pioneer town whose grounds saw the rush of miners and cowboys mark it on the map in blood. The literal translation of its Spanish name, “Fat Hill,” helps express that unshakeable bond to good ‘ole Western greed in Nevada — even if these days, Cerro Gordo is spread rather…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today Vol. (Vol. CCXCI)

1. A Welsh Island for sale (for less than an average one bedroom flat in London) The Grade-II listed fortification sits at the mouth of Milford Haven estuary and is on sale for £400,000. It was built between 1850 and 1852 to protect Britain from French invasion under the rule of Napoleon III. More info found on…

Now That Is How You Fall in Love with LA

There’s nothing more LA than trying to be a million things at once. In one afternoon, Angelinos can go from a kitsch “Casablanca” to Canter’s Deli; grab a Cuban cocktail at “Versailles” and end up at a dentist’s office that would be much better as a discotheque. It’s a wonderful, borderline perverse eclecticism that has…

Inside New York’s Greatest, Liveable Cabinet of Curiosities

Paige Stevenson doesn’t quite live in the same world as the rest of us. “People talk a lot about what it means to make art,” she says on the foggy Sunday morning when we visit her home, while biscuits warm in the oven, “I just think, why not live it? People get so caught up…

The Groundbreaking Kitsch Cowboy Art of George Quaintance

You just can’t outshine George Quaintance. Literally. Take one look at the glistening bodybuilders from his kitsch, homoerotic oeuvre, and you’d think you were looking some 1986 romance novels, but nope. These babies date back to the 1940s-50s, to an era before the queer advocacy following the AIDS crisis, and before the sexual revolution. And…

The Last House of Fans, Paris

There was once a secret language used by women for centuries to communicate unspoken sentiments across the room. It was the code of duchesses and ladies-in-waiting; women who made bi-weekly trips to the opera armed with an exquisite accessory that with a simple flick of her wrist, could declare her true feelings for a gentleman sat across…

Meet Hemingway’s Last Secret Love

Honestly, I just can’t keep up with you old Hem! In a new book, written by the great nephew of a close friend to the writer in his later years, Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse, explores the little-known love affair between a 50 year-old Hemingway and an 18 year-old Italian countess, Adriana Ivancich.…