Summer harvests are in full swing, as are all kinds of inspired cooking. This time of year, Mother Earth doesn’t just entice us to stop and smell the roses; she invites us to savor the tomatoes, shuck the corn, can the berries and pickle the cucumbers. It is time to compose meals from greenmarkets, farm stands, and our own gardens. It is time for slow food.
But “slow food” – a movement emphasizing local agriculture, livestock, and cuisines – is not just a literal concept. It is also figurative, a handy metaphor to describe the great pleasures and rewards of unplugging from the hustle and bustle of our fast-food culture. More than ever, summer is a wonderful time to surrender – to fruit, to flowers, and to the power and pleasure of a good, long book. Continue Reading →
Fashion journalist Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni’s memoir, After Andy, would be a gas even if it didn’t dish on the life and times of Andy Warhol. I use the term “gas” because the whole book crackles with English, French, and American twentieth-century slang and spoonerisms in the most delightfully gassy way. To hear Fraser-Cavassoni tell it – and she’s a truth-teller even when the truth paints her as a daft bird – her whole life has been quite a gas. Born in 1963 to best-selling author Lady Antonia Frasier and politician Sir Hugh Frasier, her stepfather was Nobel Laureate winner Harold Pinter and family friends included Caroline Kennedy, Lucian Freud, and Jean Rhys. When she was seventeen, Natasha began an affair with Mick Jagger, whom she met on a luxury yacht. She also met pretty much everyone else worth meeting in seventies, eighties, and nineties London, New York, and Los Angeles during her reign as an international “it girl” who worked as a model, actress, agent, and general gadfly. In short, she was Paris Hilton before Paris Hilton, with three key exceptions. Natasha had a sense of humor. Natasha could write. And Natasha served as the last of Andy Warhol’s “English muffins” – the term for the succession of well-bred English girls who worked in the Factory, Warhol’s legendary creative studio and business center. 
I go for whole weeks totally numb to the abject horror of our current administration. It’s not that my numbness is excusable. Nor is it that I don’t care. It’s that I reach a point of saturation in which the immense and odious destruction is more than I can bear if I’m to stay afloat in the ocean of my precarious life. Then out of nowhere it arrives again on my chest, as unavoidable as an anvil: this total absence of humanity and compassion–this sociopathology, this evil–reigning over one of the most powerful nations on Planet Earth.