Writer, Producer
Edition 28: LA’s Eastside, John Waters and the Danger of Romanticization. Eastside Los Angeles. Last month I spent a very happy week in LA, staying for the first time east of the Los Angeles River and downtown, in a community called Montecito Heights. Overlooking the mountains, the apartment offered stunning sunsets: The area was home to the Gabrielino Indians for more than two thousand years, then controlled by the Spanish in the late eighteenth century, with […]
Anna Maria Island. Ever heard of Anna Maria Island? I hadn’t either until my friend Susan let me in on this secret ‘old Florida’ gem that flies mostly under the radar screen. That is bound to change with magazines like Travel + Leisure naming it to the 2024 Must-Visit lists, although fingers crossed local council seems determined to preserve its essential unspoiled nature. AMI is the most northern of a string of barrier islands near Sarasota that run down […]
The stunning opening scenes of the 2021 James Bond film, No Time to Die, were shot in Matera, which I recently visited. Matera is located in the Italian province of Basilicata, a smidge over the border from Puglia (but formerly part of it). It’s either the third oldest city in the world, after Aleppo and Jericho and/or the oldest continually habituated city in the world, depending on who’s telling the story. Either way, it’s no spring chicken, […]
Taking Stock Last night was the winter solstice. Midwinter, the shortest day, the longest night. The ancient astronomers saw the solstice as the moment the sun stood still. A long, winter’s night that even before it finishes, has given birth to the slow climb back toward longer days and a more fiery sun. The Gemini twin-heads of endings and beginnings are on my mind as I write, waiting for the sun to come up. This year, I […]
I’m writing to you from the land of figgy pudding, carol concerts and endless streets strung with Christmas lights. December in London – my favourite time of the year. The city is jammed; one taxi driver told me it was the busiest he’d ever seen it in thirty years of driving. I made the mistake of trying to walk Oxford Street between meetings, only to find myself sandwiched in a mosh pit of humans, moving forward […]
Happy September, friends! How did we get here already? It’s Saturday, and I’m writing this at the cottage, that very Canadian of experiences, having come from a mid-afternoon kayak in the hot sun, followed by a plunge in Georgian Bay water already cooling enough to be refreshing. Tonight’s temperature promises to be an unseasonably chilly 9°C/45°F; I’m thinking a blankie, roaring fire and small scotch will be required. Bliss, in other words. August usually finds me chasing […]
A few years ago, I started work on a story idea about a woman who curates private libraries for clients. I’d recently read an article in the FT and it piqued my curiosity. A library is your story on a shelf. – Nicky Dunne, creator of bespoke private libraries. Heywood Hill is not your average bookshop. Opened in 1936, it was run during the later years of WWII by Lady Anne Gathome-Hardy and novelist Nancy Mitford, of the infamous Mitford […]
I’ve just returned from the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. It was literally the Big Smoke: at times the air was orange and unbreathable due to forest fires burning in Québec. As one taxi driver said to me, it brought back eerie memories of the last time the air had been that bad: September 11th. And I agreed. The Tribeca Film Festival was founded by Robert DeNiro, his long-term producing partner Jane Rosenthal and her then husband Craig Hatkoff in […]
I’m writing this from the Newport, Rhode Island where I am having a 4-day long weekend. It’s The Ocean Race weekend, the only North American stop on an around the world sailing race (32,000 nautical mile or 60,000 km), that is amongst the world’s toughest and craziest team sports. The crew race day and night for more than twenty days at a time on some legs, slammed by the wind and waves and extreme conditions that can fluctuate from -5 to +40 degrees […]
I don’t know about you, but I gave last weekend’s coronation a pass. The pictures on the news though, all that ceremony and pomp, cheekily reminded me of an event I stumbled upon at the National Gallery when I was in London for the Book Fair. The National Gallery’s Friday Lates is free evening arts programming that varies each week; in this case Life Drawing. Two performance artists interpreted a Renaissance painting from the gallery (The Ugly Duchess) and […]