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Valentine’s Day, 2015
By
Published: Feb 04, 2015
Category:
Beyond Classification
When I was young, I burned through people. There were so many of them, all replaceable. As I was. Try it, buy it, if you don’t like it, bring it back, get full credit. Now everyone I care about feels priceless, irreplaceable; I worry about them the way my mother still worries about me. Which makes Valentine’s Day, which once provoked scorn, one more opportunity to affirm precious connections. But not with jewels from Jared or chocolates from France. With kits — individually curated collections, some practical, some not. The personal touch. With handwritten notes on real paper. Here you’ll find the ingredients for some kits. Flowers from the deli — that’s on you.
LOVE STORIES
Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s story takes the idea of postponed romance to an astonishing extreme. As the novel begins, Dr. Juvenal Urbino, now 81, has been married to Fermina Daza, 72, for more than half a century. He tries to rescue a bird in a tree, falls and dies. His wife feels “an irresistible longing to begin life with him all over again so they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly.” Among the mourners is Florentino Ariza. He is the last to leave. And he has a shocking announcement — an announcement he has waited half a century to make: “a vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.”
The Queen’s Gambit
An eight-year-old orphan named Beth Harmon is the Mozart of chess. Which brings her joy (she wins! people notice her!) and misery (she’s alone and unloved and incapable of asking for help). She gets addicted to pills. She drinks. She loses. And then, at 17, Beth faces her biggest challenge — a match with the world champion, a Russian of scary brilliance. The love story? She’s alone, but she can’t win alone. Will she let someone in, accept support, risk hurt?
Light Years
Joe Fox, a legendary editor at Random House, was once asked which of the books he worked on would be called “great” long after their reviews were compost. There were two, he said. One was “In Cold Blood,” by Truman Capote. The other was James Salter’s novel. In “Light Years” we meet Nedra and Viri in the early 1960s, when they are twenty-eight and thirty. They have two young children, both girls. They live in a big house on the Hudson. They have affairs, watch their daughters discover their own sexuality, travel, age. There are luxurious afternoons at the beach, visits with arty friends, children’s birthday parties, shopping excursions. Nedra and Viri’s marriage strains, threatens to break up, does. The book is an accumulation of brief scenes, moments in time. The plot is merely the plot of existence.
A Sport and a Pastime
“She cannot be satisfied. She will not let him alone. She removes her clothes and calls to him. Once that night and twice the next morning he complies and in the faint darkness between lies awake, the lights of Dijon faint on the ceiling, the boulevards still. It’s a bitter night. Flats of rain are passing. Heavy drops ring in the gutter outside their window, but they are in a dovecote, they are pigeons between the eaves. The rain is falling all around them. Deep in feathers, breathing softly, they lie.”
THE FOODIE
Pu-erh tea
It’s round. It looks like a cow pie. More interesting: It may have health benefits. It also has taste benefits. Milk and sweetener are superfluous — this is a rich brew that delivers an unusually modest caffeine hit along with a welcome hint of natural sweetness. Some Pu-erh fans say the last drop is actually the best, that the last infusions taste richer and sweeter than the first.
Burr Coffee Grinder
If you’re serious about coffee, you want what the pros use: a burr grinder. A burr grinder may give you the choice of as many as 16 speeds, but because it runs at a slower speed, it generates less heat. The burrs create uniform grounds. You can set a timer for five to sixty seconds so you don’t stand there, your life reduced to this chore, while you grind.
THE ESTHETE
Perfetto Pencils
Louise Fili’s Perfetto pencil case and pencils makes me think of the Italy of the 1930s and 1940s. It’s very clean, very precise, very bold design: a sturdy case, with twelve double-sided, two-color pencils.
Quattro Parole Italian Notecards and Envelopes
Louise Fili’s box of a dozen note cards and envelopes that are just as distinctive. “Quattro Parole Italiane” is the idea. Four Italian words: ciao (hello), auguri (greetings), grazie (thank you) and prego (with pleasure). Why are these cards so striking? It’s not the words, which are refreshingly ordinary, but the typography, which is dramatic and different and, at the same time, nostalgic and familiar, taking you back to visits to small towns in Italy.
Bryan Ferry
Lust and longing are so intense here they redline into love. Obsessive love. Love on two bottles of Krug and maybe a puff of Mendocino’s best. Love that jets you out of this vale of struggle and anxiety into elegance and glory.
Bryan Ferry – Slave To Love by hushhush112
Otis Redding
Otis Redding was one of those Olympians who are fantastically good at everything. He could shout. He could dance. He had a straightforward, honest, high-testosterone presence — he was, as one of his hits had it, a “love man.” Watching footage of him performing is a revelation. The Rolling Stones drove teenagers into spasms; Otis’s female fans were adult. They’d had sex, known love, experienced heartbreak. Who wrote the book of love? This man.
THE SEEKER
Sacred Landscapes: The Threshold Between Worlds
What we have gained through science and exploration is massive. So is what our ancestors on the spiritual path learned from nature. For these places and objects from our distant past contain “inner histories” that resonate with energy. They are, literally, “thresholds” between the world we know and the cosmic knowledge imbedded in our planet.
DOWN AND DIRTY
Les Negresses Vertes
These remixes from 1987 to 1993 are destined for nights when you’ve had a tequila too many or are one toke over the line, nights when animal instinct trumps the spiritual connection. Oh, there are quiet moments and subtle effects, but they’re just for texture. Fundamentally, this is about pile-driver percussion. I have field-tested this music and pressed it on friends. Reaction is fairly uniform: In the morning, neither partner can quite look at the other. But that is not to say that Les Negresses Vertes have made anyone unhappy.
Etta James
A woman who lived this hard — who loved and lost and paid the price for everything she got and a lot she didn’t — oozes the kind of wisdom you don’t find in books. That was the thing about Etta: She had total credibility. She lived the blues, and you’d best believe she was going to tell you about them, and in the bluntest (and thus, most poetic) way possible.
Beth Hart
When I say that she is the next Amy Winehouse, I mean it in the best possible way: She has a talent with no ceiling. None. I wish I could see her tonight.
PRACTICAL BUT STYLISH
The Filson Briefcase
In a sea of products that look good but quickly fall apart, the Filson briefcase is so well designed and so well made it could be the last briefcase you’ll ever buy. At $248, that makes it a bargain. What if it glitches down the pike? Clinton Filson’s original pledge still applies: “We guarantee every item purchased from us. No more, no less. Your satisfaction is the sole purpose of our transaction.”
Timex Easy Reader Watch
Listen to James Fallows: “It’s known by its big black numbers, its faux silvery case, its red second-hand, and its elegant brown pleather strap. I love this watch because it’s easy to read in the day; because it lights up (gently) at night if you push the stem button; and because I can buy backups in bulk, so that I never have to worry if I lose a watch or leave it in the car or in the pocket of my other coat or on my desk. I have an inventory of three or four in various places and reorder when the stock runs low.”
Smartphone/Tablet Charger for the Car
The charger fits into a car’s cigarette lighter. Thanks to the wide Y-design, you can plug two — yes, two — smartphones or tablets into its USB ports. I’ll repeat that: You can charge two devices — even two iPads — at the same time. And it’s fast. The charger will give you a 20-30% boost in battery charge in 20-30 minutes. It gets pleasantly warm, but never hot.
The TaoTronics LED Desk Lamp
This lamp has a one-touch, 3-level dimmer and an I’m-leaving-the-room “escape timer” that turns the light off after an hour. The bulb is estimated to last 40,000 hours. The arm is adjustable. It uses 75% less electricity than an old-fashioned lamp. It folds for easy transport. It’s no heavier than a small bag of feathers. If the 5-star Amazon reviewers and I have missed something, I have no idea what it could be.
Yamaha Micro Component System.
Reader Review: “The Yamaha system is the best I’ve ever heard, and easy for a low-tech person such as myself to install. When my high-tech brother visited and said ‘What’s this?’ and popped his iPhone in to test it, his only comment was ‘Wow!’ Great system, great price for a boatload of features. Had to thank you!”
Zojirushi Stainless Steel Vacuum Insulated Mug
READER REVIEW: ‘I bought one of these last year on your recommendation and I can’t stop telling people what a great buy this is. 6 hours hot? Sometimes I put coffee in at 10 PM and it is still steaming when I open it at my work desk the next day at 8 AM.’
Travel Humidor
This small (9 x 6 x 4.5 inches), light (1 pound), inexpensive ($20) travel humidor holds 10 to 12 cigars and keeps them in smoke-me-now condition. It’s well-made: real wood, with strong magnets built into the hinges to keep the lid tightly closed. For infrequent cigar smokers, this could easily take the place of a larger, more expensive humidor.
BORGEN
Borgen
This is my favorite TV drama. I press it on everyone. Danish coalition politics? only on the surface. “Borgen” is shorthand for “the castle,” the home of the Danish Parliament and the government’s executive offices. It’s where Birgitte Nyborg — in the series, Denmark’s first female prime minister — spends every waking hour, trying to keep the support of her modest majority and move the country forward. It’s not an easy task, and it’s not her only task. She’s married, with two children, and her husband and her kids also need attention. You will come to care deeply about all of this.
BEAUTY AND HEALTH
Anthelios Sunscreen with Mexoryl
Yes, this stuff costs more than creams that protect against sunburn. The thing is, those creams don’t offer long-lasting protection against Ultraviolet-A rays (UV-A). And UV-A doesn’t cause sunburn — it causes cancer.
T3 Bespoke Labs 83808-SE Featherweight Professional Ionic Ceramic Tourmaline Hair Dryer
The T3 dries your hair 50-60% faster than your current dryer. The negative ions generated by the T3 add moisture to your hair (in scientific terms, they seal the moisture in).The negative ions flatten your hair, essentially eliminating frizz. What this means in the lives of some women who use the T3: “It cuts the time it takes to dry my hair by 5 minutes — and in the morning, that 5 minutes is huge.”
THE STONER
Mitch Hedberg
“An escalator can never break — it can only become stairs.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend. I just know a girl who would be really mad if she heard me say that.”
“When someone hands you a flyer, it’s like he’s saying, ‘Here, you throw this away.’”
“I order a club sandwich all the time, but I’m not even a member.”
“When I was a kid, I lay in my twin bed, wondering where my brother was.”
“Do you think that when a guy got the idea for a bong that a black light popped on?”
“Every book is a children’s book if the kid can read.”
“I have no problem not listening to The Temptations.”
“I’m sick of following my dreams. I’m just gonna ask where they’re going and hook up with them later.”
