5 Things I’m Doing In May

Everything I've been buying, listening to, going to, watching and reading this month

Hello readers! I was delighted this week to be informed that Substack had handpicked my newsletter to be featured on Substack’s Discover, so a warm welcome to my new subscribers that have arrived from finding me there! I do a run down every month of what I have been up to, so here it is for May. Gillian

BUYING 

Augustinus Bader x Sofia Coppola. Couldn’t help myself

When it comes to celebrity beauty products there is obviously a hierarchy. The most covetable are brands such as Rihanna’s Fenty and in the bargain bin you’ll find things like Adam Levine for Women eau de toilette (yep that is actually a thing). I’m not usually one for buying celebrity beauty brands but I fell hook, line and sinker for Augustinus Bader x Sofia Coppola tinted lip balm after I read about it in the New York Times.

First of all, I live for a tinted lip balm. It is my desert island beauty product (followed very closely by an eyebrow pencil) and leaving home without one is akin to forgetting my phone. Secondly, Sofia Coppola simply has impeccable taste. I couldn’t think of anyone else who might convince me to stray into the celeb beauty market more than her, especially when I already have about seven tinted lip balms in my bathroom. And finally it’s a collaboration with skincare legend Augustinus Bader so you know, product wise, you’re in safe hands.

Coppola told the Times that when she was younger she would try to emulate Nastassja Kinski’s Tess in Roman Polanski’s 1979 film adaptation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles when she eats a strawberry “that left her with perfectly berry-stained lips.” And this does just that. I bought The Tinted Balm Shade 1, which leaves a sort of raspberry smudge and I love it. The two other shades are a coral red (Shade 2) and plum (Shade 3) and you can find all of them here. At £33 they’re not the cheapest lip balms around but they’re a fraction of the price of most Augustinus Bader products. 

Berry good: Nastassja Kinski’s Tess

LISTENING

After it was announced last week that Steve Albini, musician and producer (although he preferred the term recording engineer) for artists such as Nirvana, the Pixies, PJ Harvey and Joanna Newsom, had died, my husband and I did a bit of a further deep dive into musicians he’d collaborated with and we discovered Songs: Ohia, an alias of Jason Molina, who died from complications due to alcoholism at the age of 39 in 2013, of whom neither of us had come across before (Amanda Petrusich’s piece about Albini in The New Yorker last week referred to the music of Songs: Ohia as “like a portal to another sphere, a lifeline, a hand to hold in the night”). We have been listening to Songs: Ohia’s 2003 alt-country album The Magnolia Electric Co. ever since. It is beautiful, heartbreaking and raw. In my exploring I even discovered that there’s a Substack dedicated to Molina’s work and life: Static and Distance. Do check it out. 

GOING

Chic and old school: The Arlington

For my husband’s birthday last week we went for lunch at The Arlington in St James’s, which opened in March, and we had an absolute blast. This is the old site of Le Caprice, where Princess Di used to have her gals’ lunches, and as most of the reviews have pointed out, it’s basically exactly the same restaurant; they simply can't call it Le Caprice because Richard Caring now owns the name. Before going, my mother told me that she once sat next to Joan Collins at Le Caprice in the nineties, and on this occasion we had Bill Nighy and Stephen Fry either side of us (they weren’t together, though I did try to eavesdrop on a little chat they had - sorry but wouldn’t you?) At this point, when the waiter directed me to the bathroom as “just left at Michael Caine” I assumed he was talking about the actual man but he was just referring to one of David Bailey’s black and white portraits that adorn the walls. And most of the food is as classically British as the celebrities it seems to attract: you’ll find things like calf’s liver and bacon, dressed Dorset crab and shepherd’s pie. We had the bang bang chicken and Caesar salad to start followed by the loin of tuna with spiced lentils and a salmon fishcake with sorrel sauce for main. Everything was outstanding, the staff were incredible, and we left full and merry. 20 Arlington Street, London SW1A 1RJ.

WATCHING

Need Zendaya’s Loewe ‘I Told Ya’ t-shirt

As it so happens, Augustinus Bader also has a starring role in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers which I went to see at the cinema last week (Zendaya’s Tashi liberally rubs AB body cream over herself. Translation: I’m loaded). Anyway, Zendaya is spectacular as a former tennis prodigy-turned-coach in a love triangle with two other players (Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist) that goes on over a decade. It is sexy, it is fun, it is thrilling. It’s great to watch in the cinema for the on-court action alone (I genuinely ducked every time Tashi forcefully struck the ball at the camera). And the music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross: wow. I’ve listened to the soundtrack a few times to motivate my own high-impact workouts (pushing the pram to nursery). There’s been a lot of discussion about the ending - Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called it a “cop out” - but I thought it was perfect. And if you would like to read about the film from an insider’s perspective, then I implore you to check out former tennis pro Andrea Petkovic’s brilliant Substack on it here. 

READING

I’m about a third of the way through Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff, first published in 1976, and it is the most fascinating biography. The nephew of J. P. Morgan, Harry Crosby moved to Paris and became a key member of the Lost Generation, writing poetry, befriending Ernest Hemingway, and setting up the Black Sun Press which published writers such as James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence. Crosby and his wife Caresse come across as a sort of extravagantly gothic version of wealthy couple Gerald and Sara Murphy, who basically invented American summer vacations in the south of France by hosting their expat friends in the 1920s.

The book begins in the most sensational way: in 1929 Harry Crosby doesn’t show up to a Christmas engagement and is later found dead in a friend’s studio in New York, seemingly having shot his recently married mistress Josephine and then himself. Scandal and mystery ensue. The book then goes back to put together how, and why, he ended up in such circumstances.

I hope you are all having a brilliant week and I’ll see you on Friday!