Viewing entries tagged
Lydia
Herewith the first of several recommendations for your summer reading: books featuring hotels, in all their glamorous, complicated, and luxurious (or down-and-out) glory.
First up is a classic you may already have on your bookshelf, but that is well worth a re-read for its silent backdrop of imposing facades, marble staircases, and brass bars, never mind the war and wasted youth: Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned.
It may be June 8th - the prime of glorious early summer, which my Susan Miller horoscope tells me will be a great day (and I trust her unfailingly) - but, let's face it, we're still in Mercury Retrograde. And it is a Monday, after all.
Because I know that I sure need it, I'm gifting you with the only soundtrack you'll want when life's waters get even slightly choppy. The working title is Olympia Monthly's Super Soothing Sounds of the Ocean Mix - Vol. 1.
This first of several HOLIDAYS ISSUE mix tapes is a wild, flotsam-and-jetsam, fruits-of-the-sea assortment of sailors and sea-shanties, Belle & Sebastian and British Sea Power, Händelian hornpipes and Frank Ocean. It's like a confused but energetic surf, the point of a beach where two opposing currents collide: in other words, it's a real mix.
Brainstorming recipes that might belong in our TIME ZONES ISSUE this month was no easy task. Sure, we thought of offering ideas for chic little lunches you can bring on international flights, or the best road trip offerings across bandwidths of the U.S., but nothing truly grabbed our imagination or quickened our heartbeats.
So in true Olympia Monthly form, after spending ages thinking of all the obvious things, we came up with something not quite on-topic, but not exactly off it, either. And so we present you here with a handful of recipes that require little more than assembly plus a quotient of time - be it minutes, hours, or days. No, we're not suggesting you use a crock pot! (We are anti-crock pot). Rather: we present you with our choice of homemade infusions for all the very best things we could think of: vanilla, lavender, herbes de Provence, and cardamom.
W.G. Sebald, one of our favourite writers EVER, wrote in Austerlitz, “It was only by following the course time prescribed that we could hasten through the gigantic spaces separating us from each other.”
Thus for your Monday we've compiled meditations on time (in the form of a quote, a set of historical maps, and a recommended reading list).
We have emerged from under our cloud of GREY. And now we're ready to bathe ourselves under a cloudless sun as we contemplate TIME ZONES, and particularly the ever-lengthening days and the warm promises of an impending summer.
Maybe it's because we both hail from warmer, drier climes, only to find ourselves living on a soggy island (Barbara) or in a cloudy, landlocked corner of Northern Europe (Lydia), but here at Olympia Monthly we believe ourselves to be both connoisseurs and fans of sun and warmth.
So as semi-professionals in the business of sun worshipping - and to kick off our issue on Time Zones - we present you with a list of our favorite sunshine(s), ranging from the strong and animal, to the charmingly weak and vegetal. In no particular order, each with a personal photo album.
