Rima Suqi

I was going through a plethora of emails for holiday gift guide merch, when I ran across one from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Scroll, scroll, blah, blah and then this:

WHAT? SERIOUSLY?  A coloring book featuring images of Bill Murray. Yes, THAT Bill Murray. I mean, what could be more perfect?

Who are these people who commissioned artists (including Nicholas Stevenson, Anneka Lange, Murray Somerville, Donald Ely, Hattie Stewart, Bridget Meyne, Tobias Hall, Tilly W, Lucy Ketchin, Mike Force, Rich Fairhead, Mary Cheung, Sean Wars, Mary-Louise Plum, Sam Morrison, Logan Fitzpatrick, Catherine Askew, Michael Kilkelly, Brooke Olsen, Chris Arrowsmith, Jonny Packham, Jaypee Murray, James Burgess, Thomas Key and Nathan Dirienzo) to create 23 illustrations of Bill Murray that can then be desecrated by anyone with a crayon?

(for the record, they’re Brits. I cannot believe that Brits – BRITS — beat us to this one).

Buy it here.

The latest “victim” of my NYT “Shopping With” column is interior/furniture/industrial designer, antique dealer and dog walker Steven Sclaroff. He is, hands down, one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. Some choice quotes from him in the piece include “It’s clearly not going to match any of your furniture, unless you are the exceptional owner of a suite of furniture shaped like livestock.” In another, he referenced Gorey’s “curious sofa.” I had never heard of Gorey, or the sofa (in my head he was saying Curious George’s sofa – which I don’t remember either existing or, if so, being remarkable), so I looked it up.

The full title is The Curious Sofa: a pornographic work by Ogdred Weary (real name: Edward Gorey, click through to the link for the explanation) and it was originally published in 1961.

Leave it to Steven to figure out  a way to work in a porn reference in a footstool story.

I ordered the book. It’s only about 4 inches square and features illustrations and text by Mr. Gorey (some images are here). It is suggestive, it seems Victorian, it would be a great gift for the right person. And it is apparently a cult classic. Yours truly has just joined the cult.

The Elegance of the Hedghog, recommended by Paige Novick:

New York Times review is here and describes it best. I don’t read a lot of fiction but am loving this book – its super smart and wry and very funny in a quiet way.

Coming to a bookstore near you in October. Published by Assouline.

For over 15 years, Vanity Fair’s version of the Proust questionnaire has been one of the most popular pages in the magazine. Now they’ve compiled 100 of those interviews in a book. It’s  arranged alphabetically, beginning with Robert Altman and ending with Brian Wilson, and is a great read and an even better gift ( Amazon has it for $17).

Some choice answers:

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Lauren Bacall: “a 24 inch waist”

Annette Benning: “Virginity”

Ray Charles: “Talent”

Ted Kennedy: “Silence”

What is your idea of perfect happiness”

Lou Reed: “A rent controlled apartment”

Salman Rushdie: “Life without policemen”

What do you consider the lowest depth of misery?

Maureen Dowd: “No mini-bar”

Eleanor Lambert: “Having nothing to read”

Fran Lebowitz: “French”

Arthur Miller: “Betrayal”

Gore Vidal: “A mirror”

What is your motto?

Sandra Bernhardt: “Kiss ‘em, slap ‘em, send ‘em home!”

Elaine May: “Don’t throw away designer clothes”

What do you dislike most about your appearance?

Jimmy Buffet: “Somebody stole my hair”

Karl Lagerfeld” “I spend my life working on that subject”

John Waters: “I’ve had a bad hair life”

What is your greatest extravagance?

Julia Child: “Shoes!”

Deepak Chopra: “Double hazelnut lattes”

Joan Collins: “Lawyers”

Catherine Deneuve: “Spending all my money when I was 17 years old to buy an Hermes Kelly bag”

David Mamet: “On moving house in Boston, empowering my decorator to conduct the whole proceduer while I was away on location.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger: “I am a major shoe queen”

Donald Trump: “Having to only ride an elevator to get to work”

How would you like to die:

Eric Clapton: “Fishing”

Ellen DeGeneres: “No, thank you”

Hedy Lamar: “Preferably after sex”

Olivia de Haviland: “ensconced on a chaise longue, perfumed, wearing a velvet robe and pearl earrings, with a flute of champagne beside me and having just discovered tohe answer to the last problem in a British cryptic crossword.”

I love books that provide a social history of NYC, whether or not I was part of it. Indochine: Stories, Shaken and Stirred (Rizzoli) is the latest. Read below for the official blurb. $60
The restaurant Indochine has gone from trendsetting pioneer in the mid-1980s to established scene-maker in the 1990s, to the iconic status it holds today. With spectacular images presented by some of the most renowned photographers, celebrities, and writers, Indochine celebrates twenty-five years of being an important legacy in New York’s downtown social swirl, where celebrities rub elbows with downtown hipsters, uptown moguls mix with East Village club kids, and fashion designers with artists and gallery owners. Vintage photographs from the 1980s and ’90s are mixed with contemporary collages and Polaroids taken during Indochine’s most notorious private parties. Stories by Salman Rushdie, Moby, Julianne Moore, and Bob Colacello are combined with photographs by Patrick McMullan, Roxanne Lowit, and Patrick Demarchelier, along with artworks by Francesco Clemente, Helmut Lang, Tom Sachs, Ruben Toledo, Narciso Rodriguez, Ross Bleckner, and Julian Schnabel, among many more.